Time for testing: the final pre-release for 2026-06 is available

The second and final pre-release version for the 2026-06-01 LaTeX kernel went to CTAN few days ago. We encourage everybody to try it out on their documents (and developers on their packages) so that there will be no unwanted surprises when the June release hits the streets. Just run your documents with pdflatex-dev or lualatex-dev or use l3build check --dev if you are a developer who uses l3build for your packages.

Further improvements have been made to the \DocumentMetadata command, with new keys for language support (language and other-languages) which read standard BCP-47 strings.

We have done more work on revising document command concepts in this pre-release, with the handling of empty key–value lists by \NewDocumentCommand adjusted to work more smoothly with a move from classical positional arguments.

The code for block templates has been further refined to allow more fine-grained customization, and better emulation of the enumitem package. There are also improvements to debugging support for templates.

To assist with copy-paste of text from PDFs, we have further improved support for Unicode mappings for the standard math mode fonts.

A number of subtle spacing bugs in amsmath have been addressed in this pre-release: testing is strongly encouraged in this area.

After a bit of consideration, we have renamed the collected documentation for ‘newer’ commands to cmdguide (from latex-cmds): this fits better with the long-standing set of ‘guide’ files.

As always, for full details of all of the changes planned for 2026-06-01, see the draft LaTeX News 43.

Enjoy — Joseph