The first pre-release version for the 2026-06-01 LaTeX kernel went to CTAN few days ago: it’s now in TeX Live, and we hope people will test it out.

Work continues on bringing more flexible and predictable design support to different areas of the kernel: this is needed for tagged PDF output but also helps more generally in making it easier to customize LaTeX.

Most notably, block environments (such as lists, quotes and proofs), and sectioning commands (\chapter, \section and so forth) have been re-implemented using the template system. This means that the code is entirely new if you use \DocumentMetadata. This is an area that we’d particularly encourage interested users to test, particularly with varied package loading. For the more adventurous, please try out modifying the instances (or even providing additional templates)!

We are now emulating all keys of the enumitem package and \usepackage{enumitem} will simply be ignored when \DocumentMetadatais loaded. As this is not yet a full emulation we are very much interested in feedback on things that do not work yet or work differently. Thus, please report issues at the tagging project repository.

Supporting work on the lower-level template and document command architecture continues, with a modification to the -NoValue- concept and support for recovering instance values.

To help users find the various newer features, we have made a start on a single documentation file, currently called latex-cmds (very much a working title). This already contains the documentation for

• Hooks (including shipout, command and generic hooks)
• Properties
• Sockets
• Templates

and over time we expect to add more information, first for newer features and then more generally.

For full details of all of the changes planned for 2026-06-01, see the draft LaTeX News 43.

Enjoy — Joseph