The final pre-release version for the 2025-11-01 LaTeX kernel went to CTAN few days ago: it’s now in TeX Live, and we hope people will test it out.

As with previous recent releases, the major focus here is tagging: we are improving the code in various places, and moving from ‘development’ to ‘production ready’ status for tagging - at least if you are using a supported subset of packages.

Beyond tagging, we’ve taken the opportunity to address some long-standing oddities in the kernel. In particular, \newcommand now avoids making \long macros if there are no arguments to be collected. This one needs developers to test it: please try out your files using latex-dev! There are as always a collection of bug-fixes too: it is not impossible that these corrections affect package code.

For full details of all of the changes planned for 2025-11-01, see the draft LaTeX News 42.

Enjoy — Joseph