What have been the most important changes to LaTeX in the last five years? (2005–2010)

The biggest change has been that now pdftex is the default engine for latex. However, unless you write packages, you do not need to be aware of the differences. There is also a lot of momentum in LaTeX3, but most of the code is used behind the scenes by other packages. Again, unless you are a package writer, you do not need to learn anything new here.

Many new and interesting packages have appeared:

  • beamer for presentations
  • tikz for drawing (although I think that they were around 5 years ago)
  • biblatex for bibliography (not so important if you are in sciences)
  • mathtools for math (fixes and improves lot of amsmath environments)
  • breqn for automatic line breaking in display math.
  • .... I am sure there are other packages that I am missing

Aditya has mentioned packages, and Jan has mentioned engines, but there has also been lots of infrastructure developments that make dealing with LaTeX more convenient:

  • A new cross-platform editor, TeXworks, that (I think) is the easiest way to get started with LaTeX because of its simple interface and embedded PDF viewer
  • For TeX Live, an update mechanism so you (usually) never need to install packages manually again
  • SyncTeX, used by TeXworks and other editors to allow you to jump from a position in a source document into the corresponding location in the PDF output
  • Restricted shell escape, which (as of TeX Live 2010) automatically converts EPS to PDF behind the scenes so you can write \includegraphics{foo.eps} in a pdfLaTeX document

In addition, some other recent-ish tools that haven't been mentioned yet:

  • xindy for multilingual indexing
  • The Asymptote drawing program
  • siunitx
  • countless others :) but you'll discover them if you need them

There has even been a new version of TeX, which is interested for historical reasons but you won't notice the difference.


Maybe another thing to mention is that thanks to new engines, like xetex and luatex, we now have access to many more fonts than before, and it is possible to use many features of the OT fonts. I am not sure what is the timeline, and how much of this was available five years ago, though. I only became aware of this relatively recently.

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