TeX Live 2026 released

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2026.

Nothing spectacularly new in this version, but improvements across that bank, and a new player: `xdvipsk`, an extended dvips with support for more image formats and (with LuaTeX) OpenType and TrueType fonts. Things I was very directly involved in are the PNG inclusion infos via env vars, the nlink changes, and tlmgr updates.

Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release! Many thanks in particular 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 again Siep, and best wishes!

Finally, here are the changes as listed in the master TeX Live documentation:

Cross-engine changes (except in original TeX and Aleph):

• When the “Infinite glue shrinkage” error is ignored (see the 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:

• 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:

• 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:

• 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:

• 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.

epTeX, eupTeX:

• Cross-engine updates noted above.

XeTeX:

• Cross-engine updates noted above.

Dvipdfmx:

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

CWEB:

• 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:

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

Kpathsea:

• 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:

• Check for backup container creation failure.
• In –usermode, do not warn about the texlive-scripts package 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 the article by Sigitas Tolusis in TUGboat, https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2/tb119tolusis.pdf.
• Many man pages substantially updated.

Platforms:

• See MacTeX note just below.
• The i386-linux, aarch64-linux, and armhf-linux binaries are now built on Debian bullseye (initially released 2021).

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 companion small BasicTeX distribution for Macs (download size about 120MB, https://tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html) 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.

That’s all, let the fun begin! And again, thanks to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release!

See also: Original Source by Norbert Preining