As announced today, topic tagging has been implemented for the LaTeX Community forum.

A tag is a keyword which classifies a topic. Using tags, topics are categorized by subject, which makes browsing easier and helps to look-up topics. Carefully selected tags are a great addition to full text search - a human made index is better than machine searching. Besides the broad forum categories (subforums), you could then filter for tags such as TikZ, Koma-Script, BibTeX, editor names, package names, and more.

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The TeX Live net installer is a great tool. However, with a slow Internet connection it may be daunting. Think of multiple installations in a company, or imagine several users at a TeX conference or another meeting would like to install TeX Live concurrently using the meeting's internet connection.

Possible solutions would be distributing DVDs or USB sticks with a possibly slightly outdated version, using a cache such as a proxy server, or setting up a local mirror repository. Now there's another way.

Almost a year ago I launched LaTeXTemplates.com and wrote a post here introducing templates and explaining their benefits to users of LaTeX. In the present post I would like to update the community on the progress of LaTeX Templates and present my thoughts on the progression of LaTeX over the last year and into the future.

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Martin Scharrer has released version 0.3b of his tikz-timing package. The package provides macros and an environment to generate timing diagrams (digital waveforms). The TikZ (pgf) package is used to produce the graphics.

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Paul Thompson has released version 9.4 of his newlfm class. The new version fixes several bugs and introduces some new features. The newlfm document class integrates the letter class with fancyhdr and geometry to automatically make letterhead stationery.

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John Collins has released version 4.05 of his latexmk script. The new version fixes several bugs. Latexmk completely automates the process of generating a LaTeX document. Given the source files for a document, latexmk issues the appropriate sequence of commands to generate a DVI, PS, PDF or hardcopy version of the document.

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LyX has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. Each summer, since 2005, Google awards stipends to students who successfully completed a free and open-source coding project during that summer - that's why the name, which was drawn from the 1967 Summer of Love.

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Today Khaled Hosny released XeTeX 0.9999​.0, the first beta version of the 0.9999​ series. There are some major changes. The most notable improvement is the port from the ICU LayoutEngine to HarfBuzz.

HarfBuzz is an OpenType text shaping engine, which is under active development and offers a much wider OpenType support. This step also fixes a number of known bugs.

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On several TeX sites users wrote that in the recent days a problem occured after they updated their MiKTeX installation: amsmath could not be used any more since MiKTeX has marked amslatex as obsolete, so it was uninstalled.

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• Joseph Wright has been working on adding "native" drivers for LaTeX3 to support box transformations such as rotation, clipping and scaling with dvips and xdvipdfmx drivers, and with direct PDF output.
• Bruno Le Floch has developed a TeX-based regex (regular expression) engine, which works with pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX.
• The xparse module has been overhauled and became more efficient.
• Work on the galley module continues. The galley module is for managing the vertical area into which text and other content is placed.

Will Robertson and Zebb Prime have released version 1.1 of their pstool package. This version adds some minor configuration options and slightly changes the way file names are processed; they are now fully expanded before being written to the auxiliary file to be processed.

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Massimo Redaelli has released version 0.2 of his circuitikz package. The package provides a set of macros for typesetting electrical and electronic networks.

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Peter R. Wilson has released a new version of his document class memoir. The new version fixes some minor bugs. The memoir document class is for typesetting poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and mathematical works.

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The CTAN website http://www.ctan.org/ has been relaunched and shows a new design.

Content and features of the old site old site are now available in a new look and feel. The landing page is more informative, browsing CTAN tree and package catalogue has been improved, the upload form is better, and there's a better handling of CTAN mirrors. By a few clicks you could even change the skin of the web site, to better suit your personal taste.

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The web site and forum LaTeX-Community.org has moved to a new server, and I am maintaining it now. Many thanks go to Sven, who founded the forum in 2007, and administered it until now.