TUG 2020 — Frank Mittelbach — Quo Vadis LaTeX(3) — A look at the upcoming years

What people said

Recommends DavidS · 2020-10 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “Why is LaTeX3 taking so long to come out?”

Here is an interesting talk by Frank Mittelbach: [this video] It looks like Latex development will be by evolution rather than revolution. So while Latex is indeed being developed, changing the name to Latex 3 may not happen.

Recommends Ulrike Fischer · 2020-11 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “What's the current state of LaTeX3 (2020)?”

At some time in the past there was a plan to create a new LaTeX3 format which would replace LaTeX2e in the same way as LaTeX2e replaced LaTeX2.09. This plan has been changed. As mentioned around minute 20 in the talk of Frank Mittelbach at TUG 2020 ( [this video] ), the new policy is to modernize LaTeX through "gentle refactoring" and there will be no new separate product. This refactoring has already started. For example utf8 has been made the default encoding; at the begin of the year the expl3 code was integrated into the format; in October large parts of the xparse package were moved into the format and significant changes were made in various places to integrate more hooks. So one could say

Recommends Frank Mittelbach · 2021-06 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “Major changes in LaTeX2e/LaTeX3 kernel”

As Joseph said the collection of LaTeX Newsletters in ltnews.pdf gives a fairly detailed picture of the work that went into LaTeX2e since its original release in 1994. However, it doesn't really say what the highlights are. My personal and biased selection is given in two talks which got taped: 2008 TUG Conference: Windows of Opportunities: A personal history of two decades of LaTeX development [LINK] 2020 TUG Conference: Quo Vadis LaTeX(3) — A look at the upcoming years [this video] The first is a review at a time I was thinking to step down from work on LaTeX and was summarizing what I think we achieved and what not. The second starts with a brief summary of all of the LaTeX Project Teams work

Cites DavidS · 2020-10 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “Difference between LaTeX, LaTeX2e, LaTeX3 ?”

At this point in time the plan is to evolve LaTeX incrementally rather than trying to switch to a new code base all at once. See the talk by Frank Mittelbach: [this video] So while the goals of the LaTeX3 project are coming to fruition, there are no plans currently for changing the name from LaTeX2e to LaTeX3.

Cites Ulrike Fischer · 2020-11 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “not works tagging of tabular with one cell”

No the latex2e format will not disappear. The plan is to develop it. See e.g. Frank Talk at tug 2020: [this video]

Cites Ibiloye Abiodun Christian · 2021-04 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “What is LaTeX3 correcting in LaTeX2e? And, updates 2021 on LaTeX implementation on small mobiles OS?”

Thanks @Fischer. I hope I can confidently say "LaTeX3 is already here" but good to know people are already using some of the features and expl3 is found more natural and resourceful by users. And, LaTeX3 is not replacing LaTeX2e! Thanks again Fischer Ulrike

Cites Norman Gray · 2021-05 · TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange · on “Guidance on producing screen-readable documents”

I have an answer to my own question. The following notes – something of a brain-dump, but I hope useful to someone – are correct as of early 2021. They're broadly positive; there are a few things that don't work as well as one might hope, but things should improve, on that front, in time. In the end, I did three things here. I adjusted the class file I developed for the relevant documents, to create a B6-sized document, which works when viewed on-screen as PDF. This works pretty completely, and produced something I'm content with, at the cost of less work than I anticipated. However it is generally not ‘accessible’, in the sense of being friendly to, eg, text-to-speech readers, and other too