MiKTeX Blog

MiKTeX 2.8 Beta 1 is available! This is a source code release for GNU/Linux.

Please visit the 2.8 status page, if you want to try it out.

What's new

The MiKTeX package manager graphical user interface (GUI) has been ported to GNU/Linux using the Qt widget toolkit.

The GUI allows you to browse the package database and install packages.

What comes next

This is the todo list for the upcoming beta releases:

• MiKTeX-pdfTeX for GNU/Linux:
  The MiKTeX variant of pdfTeX has the MiKTeX package manager
  integrated. This feature makes it possible to install missing packages
  on-the-fly.
• LuaTeX integration

I have started MiKTeX 2.8 development a short while ago. Here is what has been done and what will happen in the next couple of months:

MiKTeX package manager GUI (Linux)

My development progress bar shows sixty percent.

What has been done:

• package information is displayed in a list view window
• it is possible to install/remove packages
  

What is missing:

• search for packages (using file names or keywords
  

The source code will be made available soon.

Coding this initial version was fun. I have learned many new things (Qt, Unix build tools, ...). Not a waste of time. But:

Now that TeX Live has a nice package manager of its own, I do not
expect much interest in the MiKTeX package manager for Linux. That
said, I only will continue to spend time on this project, if more
pledges come in. See http://micropledge.com/projects/miktex-mpm-qt?do=pledge, for more information.

LuaTeX integration

Nothing happened yet. I took a look at the LuaTeX development sources and discovered no stumbling points. On principle, it should be possible to integrate LuaTeX. And I will start this task in October. It remains to be seen whether LuaTeX will be successful. At the moment, only ConTeXt seems to make use of its features.

pdfTeX for Linux

I will make available the MiKTeX version of pdfTeX for Linux.

Sad but true: It is not likely that MiKTeX 2.7 works on legacy Windows systems (9x/Me/NT). It seems that the new build system, Visual Studio 2008, does not support legacy targets.

I am planning to make available a beta version of MiKTeX 2.7 in September. This will contain XeTeX 0.996. The 2.7 status page will be updated soon.

MiKTeX 2.6 will offer COM interfaces that make it possible to automate MiKTeX-specific tasks. More...

MiKTeX 2.5 is not designed to be run on Windows Vista. But Microsoft "added some shims to Windows Vista specifically for the MiKTeX 2.5 installer. They do not resolve all the compatibility problems, but they do resolve the UAP-related issues". There remain a few issues, but all in all you will find that MiKTeX 2.5 runs reasonable well on Windows Vista. More...

This is a new feature in Beta 11:

TeX's input/output primitives can now be used for unidirectional interprocess communication by prepending a pipe symbol to the file name. More...

pdfeTeX becomes the default TeX engine, i.e., running latex.exe will give you this banner:

This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.30.6-2.2 (MiKTeX 2.5)

Please note that latex.exe still produces DVI output.

A new version of the MiKTeX 2.5 Preview Document is avalailable (PDF).

Yap is on the workbench and I can promise that support for PostScript will be improved significantly. The motto is: Every DVI document that can be viewed with a PostScript viewer (after DVI-to-PostScript) can be viewed with Yap. More...