Pretesting TeX Live 2026

The entire TeX community greatly benefits from all testing before the official release. The more people who test in advance, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL. Please give it a try if you can.

As distributed, the pretest will not interfere with any existing installations of TeX, either native TeX Live or operating system distributions.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - migrating - news.

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: copy-paste an https or ftp url when running the installer directly, or use an rsync url for mirroring, as described below. Our thanks to these sites for making their space and bandwidth available. And more mirrors are welcome.

You can do a network installation of TL, or mirror the whole tlpretest directory, or start from an existing up-to-date installation:

• To do a network installation, download either install-tl-unx.tar.gz (Unix) or install-tl.zip (larger; Windows or Unix), unpack it, and run the included install-tl script, as described below. To reiterate: you must use install-tl from the pretest; trying to work with a TL installation from previous years will fail.
• To mirror the whole directory, rsync is the most efficient method:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude="*.pkg*" somemirror::/pretest/path/ /your/local/dir
  Add -v if you want to see the names of the files as they are transferred.
  Add -L if your system does not support symbolic links.
  Full rsync documentation.

  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, below.

  You can use wget or other tools to mirror via http or ftp need be. Whatever the method, do not fail to exclude mactex* or you will double the (already quite large) transfer.

  Conversely, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you can mirror/download only the full mactex-*.pkg file (several gb) or mactex-basictex-*.pkg (100+mb), as in, for the full MacTeX:
  rsync -a --delete --include="mactex-2*" --exclude="*" somemirror::/pretest/path/ /your/local/dir

• To start with an existing installation, see below.

For regular installations via download (i.e., not mirroring), we highly recommend installing the LWP Perl package if you don't already have it.

The pretest build runs nightly, ending by 04:00 Copenhagen time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a few hours after that. (Current time in Denmark: Saturday, 13-Jun-2026 20:22:40 CEST.)

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl-windows.bat (Windows) to perform the installation.

If you are performing a network installation, the pretest repository location from which to install must be specified, as shown in these examples (see downloading above for the location urls). The location must be an ftp or http url (not rsync).

However, in the case of installing from your own mirrored repository, you should omit -repository location from the given command lines.

• install-tl -repository location -gui text
  for text (command line) mode; this is the default.
• install-tl -repository location -gui
  This runs a Tcl/Tk-based GUI if Tcl/Tk is available, simple at startup but with a button to invoke the advanced interface. If Tcl/Tk is not available, falls back to text mode. TeX Live includes a Tcl/Tk runtime for Windows; on other platforms, it has to be installed externally. The Tcl/Tk version bundled with macOS cannot run our GUI.
• install-tl-windows -repository location
  which runs the GUI above by default, and also sets up to use the TL-bundled (minimal) Perl.

For information on all of the installer options, run install-tl --help, or see the install-tl documentation page.

GPG: If you are on Windows or Mac, and don't already have GnuPG (a.k.a. GPG) installed: after the installation is done, you might wish to run

tlmgr --repository http://www.texlive.info/tlgpg/ install tlgpg # windows/mac

This will enable checking that further updates come from the authentic source. On other systems, you'll need to install GPG through your operating system's package manager, outside of TeX Live. That can be done at any time.

Testing

After a successful installation, please first try simple test documents, such as latex small2e and pdflatex sample2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected. If third-party packages have changed incompatibly, their maintainers should be contacted directly.

Updating

After a successful installation, you can update from the tlpretest repository using tlmgr from time to time, if you wish. In the event of unusually drastic changes during the pretest you may have to reinstall.

Reporting problems

Please email bug reports, suggestions, comments on TeX Live itself (the installation process, tlmgr, etc.) to tex-live@tug.org (archive). Bugs about specific packages should be reported to the package maintainers; TeX Live's basic job is to install (some of) what is on CTAN, not make changes on top of it. Resources for general questions and help using TeX are available.

Migrating from the pretest to the release

The last pretest build is usually close to the official release. If you are using the standard directory setup, you can rename your pretest installation (say, /usr/local/texlive/pretest) to the per-year directory (/usr/local/texlive/2026) and change your search path. The other change you will most likely need to make is to take updates from CTAN again: tlmgr option repo ctan.

Then, after the release is made, a normal update (tlmgr update --self --all) should sync with whatever changes were made after the last pretest. The result should be equivalent to doing a full installation.

Initializing from a current installation

For people comfortable with the command line: if you have an up-to-date TL installation, you can use it as the basis for the pretest installation instead of downloading everything again. In short:

cd /usr/local/texlive  # adjust path as needed if not default
mkdir pretest
ls pretest  # check that you're starting with an empty dir

cd 2025     # cd to directory of your current/up-to-date TL installation

# do the big copy, preserving symlinks:
nice -19 cp -ar *.* bin/ README install-tl texmf-{dist,local} tlpkg ../pretest/

cd /usr/local/texlive/pretest
PATH=`pwd`/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH       # or whatever current platform
wget PRETEST-URL/update-tlmgr-latest.sh # or curl, whatever
sh update-tlmgr-latest.sh
tlmgr option repo PRETEST-URL
tlmgr update --self && tlmgr update --all

Then you'll probably want to permanently adjust your PATH so the new binaries are found first, in whatever way you usually do.

The critical thing here is the cp. The -a option to GNU cp preserves symlinks; if your cp doesn't have that, use tar or another method to do the copy instead of cp. Symlinks must be preserved.

The PRETEST-URL placeholder string means one of the pretest repositories.

Notable changes

Updates to the main TeX Live documentation and the translations are in progress, as is the list of changes.

As always, there are pervasive updates to packages and programs. We can't list them all, but here are the major user-visible changes in the principal programs since last year's release (please email us if you notice changes not listed):

Cross-engine updates

• When the “Infinite glue shrinkage” error is ignored (see the TeX Live 2025 release notes), the word “error” is no longer included in the output, and the message is written only to the log file. This was a source of minor confusion and false positives.

hitex (full HiTeX news)

• Now exclusively uses the UTF-8 input encoding.
• OpenType and TrueType fonts are now supported minimally (no ligatures, no math); this will improve in time.
• \Uchar and \Ucharcat primitives added.
• The LaTeX kernel needs updates for this version, so hilatex is not available for the time being.
• Major changes throughout the code base, including the HINT viewers, to implement the above. Use with care!
• Cross-engine updates noted above.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

• New luaffi.
• Lua bindings for the HarfBuzz subset API.
• read_img now looks in a given --output-directory.
• Saves and restores pdf->objcompresslevel along with pdf->compress_level.
• texlua errors print tracebacks.
• set_macro check for removing trailing space improved.
• Wrong spacing around display with \matheqdirmode=1 partially fixed.
• Restored \mathflattenmode.
• Fixes for legacy handling of TrueType fonts.
• Experimental extension to ToUnicode for Type 1 fonts.
• Maximum size of the destination names table for PDF output raised to 1048576.
• Additional value field for write nodes (getfield) for unexpanded token tables.
• Some unused modes made obsolete.
• Cross-engine updates noted above.

metapost (full MetaPost news)

• mp_number_to_scaled returns a 64-bit signed integer instead of the system-dependent int. Internally, start on replacing int with int64_t in general.
• mp_hard_times fixed.
• Fixes for weave.
• Help message reorganized and updated for consistency.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

• Don't complain about PDF minor version <=2 unless major version == 1.
• Don't erroneously shift fraction denominators or other text if \pdfpageheight is used.
• Fix overlapping text in ptmr8r and other fonts.
• If the environment variable TEXMF_DEBUG_PNG_COPY is set to 1, report attributes of each png image and whether it was copied.
• Cross-engine updates noted above.

(e)(u)ptex (full ChangeLog)

Cross-engine updates noted above.

xetex (full XeTeX news)

Cross-engine updates noted above.

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

• Option -o - to send output to stdout reenabled, after being unintentionally disabled for several years.

cweb (full cweb news)

• All cweb programs work --verbosely by default again.
• All cweb programs no longer fail in case of warning messages.
• ctangle produces far less whitespace in preprocessor macros.
• ctwill-proofsort supports multiple definitions for the same identifier.

upmendex (full upmendex news)

Experimental support for Brahmic scripts (Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Kannada, Lao, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu).

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)

• New configuration value texmf_nlink_for_leaf to specify whether the st_nlink=2 check is made to decide whether we're in a leaf directory; in the default texmf.cnf, the check is now disabled.
• The configuration value openin_any no longer has any effect; the interface functions are still compiled into the library, but now consider any filename to be ok for reading. To the best of anyone's knowledge, no value but `a' was ever useful (or used),

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

• Check for backup container creation failure.
• In --usermode, do not warn about texlive-scripts being missing.

Other programs

• fmtutil, updmap: make self-locating as with tlmgr.
• New program xdvipsk, an extended dvips with support for more image formats and (with LuaTeX) OpenType and TrueTYpe fonts. See article by Sigitas Tolusis in TUGboat.
• Many man pages substantially updated.

MacTeX

MacTeX-2026 now supports Big Sur (2020, macOS 11) and higher, on both Intel and Arm. Support for Mojave (2018) and Catalina (2019, macOS 10) has been dropped. It installs:

• TeX Live 2026;
• Ghostscript-10.06.0;
• TeXShop, including a special version supporting Liquid Glass;
• LaTeXiT, BibDesk, hintView.

The small BasicTeX distribution for Macs (download size about 120MB) now includes all core packages for tagging support, the LaTeX -dev engines for testing, and tex4ht. Those who would like to install this on other platforms can use scheme-small. BasicTeX supports all three main typesetting engines: pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, and LuaLaTeX.

Platforms

See MacTeX note just above. Also, i386-linux, aarch64-linux, and armhf-linux binaries are now built on Debian bullseye (initially released 2021). Finally, the asy(mptote) binary for aarch64-linux has been dropped.

Finally, many thanks to Siep Kroonenberg for her work on TeX Live, especially Windows support, for many years. She has retired and is moving on to other projects. Thanks Siep, and best wishes!

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please report them. Such documentation improvements are useful for the whole TeX Live community.