TeX Live 2026 is available for download now
tug.org84 points by jithinraj 10 hours ago
84 points by jithinraj 10 hours ago
ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/
It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148
I'd imagine making a FOSS port in Rust that has non-cryptic error messages wouldn't be a multi-year project using modern GPTs.
> ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.
> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:
$ mtxrunjit --script context doc.tex
...
> tex error on line 1 in file doc.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
...
1 >> \documentclass{article}
2 \begin{document}Hello, world\end{document}
I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?
You wrote a LaTeX document. ConTeXt does not claim to be compatible with LaTeX.
You can find a "hello world" here: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Document_layout_and_layers/Tu...
LaTeX is not ConTeXt.
Both use TeX as their layout engine. Both are different type of markup languages that live on top of TeX.
How did you install ConTeXt? Because "mtxrunjit" shouldn't be included in any modern versions.
I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.
The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.
BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.
I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3[1][2]. Also, it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic[3][4] (which looks like a dead project itself) out of the box.
[1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/
[2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3
> I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3
It's either already here or never happening, depending on your perspective [0] [1].
> it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic
What do you mean by "automation"?
[0]: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-1/tb136mitt-history.pdf#page=5
Seems like an admirable project but they’re building on creaky foundations. Even the way TexLive is released feels like something from academia than a real piece of software.
I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.
Yes, unlike real software it has backward compatibility to the 80s.
Things break all the damn time with LaTeX. Example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/730126/update-to-cle...
Sometimes bugs appear only if you load three specific packages in a specific order. The fact that there are no namespaces and every package can modify everything makes it a complete nightmare. LaTeX would do well to take a hint from the lessons we learned in the past 40 years. Or just retire it and push something sane forward, like Typst.
Latex is not Tex.
Neither is texlive. Texlive and LaTeX is what this thread and the comment you replied to are about.
Typst is a replacement for TeX.
Not LaTeX.
You'd of course need to read the documentation on what TeX and LaTeX are to understand this. Most people would rather write a new system.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.