The LaTeX Project

PDF Association’s press release: Accessible math in PDF – finally!

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PDF Association’s press release: Accessible math in PDF – finally!

We are pleased to announce that the PDF Association (PDFA) has just issued a press release highlighting the LaTeX Team’s work to make accessible math in PDF a reality. With the latest developments based on PDF 2.0 and PDF/UA‑2, LaTeX can now automatically generate PDFs with STEM content, such as mathematics, that are truly accessible and compliant with the PDF/UA‑2 ISO standard. This change closes a major accessibility gap for STEM documents and opens the door to recompiling large archives of existing LaTeX‑based PDFs in an accessible form.

If you followed our work in the Tagging Project then this isn’t really news for you, but it’s especially gratifying to see our work appreciated and recognized by the broader community, and it is encouraging that the industry is embracing these standards more and more.

In particular, Firefox is now capable (with release 148) to correctly interpret PDFs that are tagged and contain MathML to describe mathematical formulas, and we have high hopes that Chrome will follow soon.

Learn more this in the PDF Association’s press release.

Enjoy — Frank

Pre-release 1 of LaTeX 2026-06-01 is available for testing

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-release 1 of LaTeX 2026-06-01 is available for testing

The first 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.

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

LaTeX 2025-11-01 released and distributed

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

LaTeX 2025-11-01 release distributed

We sent the 2025-11-01 release of the LaTeX kernel to CTAN last weekend. By now, it’s available to users in TeX Live and MiKTeX.

News from the tagging project

The tagging project remains the major focus of the team, and in this release we have extended what happens when you give the command \DocumentMetadata. This now always loads the new code we are working on in latex-lab. Tagging remains opt-in, still needing

\DocumentMetadata{lang = ..., tagging = on}

We have worked across the tagging codebase, extending tagging sockets, normalizing key names and starting on support for contexts (for example linked to font size).

For better math tagging, we now support intent attributes: these allow for example |x| to be read as more than ‘bar x bar’. Also notable for math mode is that we have fixed an issue with tabular cells: these now get the correct MathML representation.

Other improvements and changes

The newsletter also covers various other small enhancements or corrections that we provide with the November release.

Enjoy – Joseph

Accessibility of STEM documents - talk at PDF days 2025 in Berlin

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Accessibility for STEM documents - talk at PDF days 2025 in Berlin

In September, Ulrike, Joseph, and I attended PDF Days in Berlin to present our work on making complex STEM documents truly accessible. The core message: PDF/UA-1 simply isn’t designed for mathematics, so marking documents as “compliant” doesn’t mean they’re actually usable by people with disabilities. PDF/UA-2, on the other hand, handles math properly through MathML support—it’s the standard that actually works for STEM.

The challenge is industry support. PDF/UA-2 is relatively new, so tools and workflows are still catching up. But there’s progress: several hundred LaTeX packages are now compatible with accessible output generation and an end-to-end workflow exist, meaning researchers and technical writers can start to produce accessible documents with minimal extra configuration. And doing so will hopefully push industry adoption further along.

The talks are now online. Beyond my presentation, there are several worth checking out if accessibility in PDF matters to your work.

One note on the recording: you’ll notice I restart the audio output in my examples several times, insisting it wasn’t working. The irony is that the speech recorded perfectly—it was the conference room microphone that failed in real-time. Lesson learned: even at accessibility-focused events, the technology doesn’t always cooperate.

We also presented a poster on the topic, which is now also available online together with a few others.

Enjoy — Frank

Pre-release 3 of LaTeX 2025-11-01 is available for testing

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-release 3 of LaTeX 2025-11-01 is available for testing

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

LaTeX 2025-06-01 released and distributed

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

LaTeX 2025-06-01 release distributed

We sent the 2025-06-01 release of the LaTeX kernel to CTAN over the weekend. It will be appearing to most users via TeX Live about now, and shortly in MiKTeX.

News from the tagging project

Work continues on the tagging project, and this release sees major work on tagging mathematics, with automatic generation of MathML now available in LuaTeX. The MathML can then be used as an Associated File (AF) for PDF 2.0 output: a big step in providing accessible mathematics. There are (as usual) some caveats at present, but for many cases, this is already very usable.

Tagging is now easier to turn on, as we’ve improved the keys to \DocumentMetadata: all you need now is

\DocumentMetadata{lang = ..., tagging = on}

This change emphasises that we are now at the stage where a tagging is becoming less experimental and more routinely-usable.

We’ve adjusted the standard PDF output: it’s now PDF 2.0 when tagging. That’s because PDF 2.0 is much better for tagging than PDF 1.x: but you can still request the older output format.

Other improvements in tagging are there, of course, most notably addressing some spacing oddities following display math mode.

Improving marks and output routine

A few releases ago, we integrated a new marks mechanism into the kernel, but left the classical approach available as a separate code path. That has now been addressed: the older interfaces now use the new mechanism, and multiple mark classes can be used with, for example, multicol.

The marks code was originally developed many (many) years ago as part of work on a new output routine (OR). Whilst today we don’t plan quite such radical changes, we are improving the OR. To support accessibility, we need to integrate a number of hooks, and this is an opportunity to refactor the OR to use the socket/plug approach. This should make the OR much easier to control without needing to completely replace it.

Other improvements and changes

The newsletter also covers various other small enhancements or corrections that we provide with the June release.

Enjoy – Joseph

Retirement of the LaTeX-L mailing list

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Retirement of the LaTeX-L mailing list

Public discussion about LaTeX developments for many years took place on the LaTeX-L mailing list, hosted by the University of Heidelberg. However, over time, active input moved elsewhere, most obviously to TeX StackExchange Chat for more informal back-and-forward, and to GitHub Discussions for more formal and archived threads.

We’ve been removing mentions of LaTeX-L from our documentation and from the website, as the traffic levels had fallen to the point that the list was no longer sensible to highlight. The time has now come for the list to be retired, which won’t impact ongoing work but some long-standing users might want to note.

All the best — Joseph

Pre-release 4 of LaTeX 2025-06-01 is available for testing

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-release 4 of LaTeX 2025-06-01 is available for testing

We posted a couple of weeks ago that a ‘final’ development release of the 2025-06-01 kernel had gone to CTAN. A few things have come up in testing that pre-release, so we have updated again to pre-release 4. Hopefully that catches the issues without adding new ones - testing would be much appreciated.

Enjoy — Joseph

Final pre-release of LaTeX 2025-06-01 is available for testing

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Final pre-release of LaTeX 2025-06-01 is available for testing

The (hopefully) final pre-release version for the 2025-06-01 LaTeX kernel went to CTAN over the weekend. It’s now available for testing in TeX Live, and we’d like to encourage everyone to try it out.

The focus has been mainly on improving tagging further, with work particularly on verbatim material and further socket refinement. We’ve also added tagging support for more graphics, most notable TikZ. There’s also been some support work for taggable presentations (more on that perhaps next time!).

For full details of all of the changes planned for 2025-06-01, see the draft LaTeX News 41.

Enjoy — Joseph

New TeXLive.net server & Book Discounts

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

New TeXLive.net server & Book Discounts

The TeXLive.net server that hosts a public LaTeX service for running LaTeX in the browser (as used, for example, at the learnlatex.org tutorial site) has been upgraded to a new server.

This server is also used by other sites such as LaTeX Community Forum and TikZ.net and the recently advertised tool to display PDF tagging structure.

The server has the latest Debian operating system and TeX Live 2025. It has more memory and more cores available than the previous server.

As before, the virtual machine hosting the service has been kindly provided by Stefan Kottwitz, with support from DANTE.

To celebrate the update, Stefan has arranged a time limited 15% discount on three of his LaTeX books:

Use the voucher code LEARNLATEX15 (valid until 22nd April 2025).