CTAN Update: Knuth's TeX tune-up of 2014

[CTAN Announcements]

Donald Knuth has released his so-called "TeX tune-up" for 2014: new
versions of TeX, Metafont, and assorted texware and mfware programs.
There are no changes in Computer Modern affecting either glyph shapes or
metrics this time.

As usual, the changes in general are both very small and very technical,
nothing that users (even expert users) need be concerned about.  Since I
know people will just wonder if I don't describe them, here they are: in
TeX, a space was incorrectly omitted after a null control sequence (if
you cannot imagine what this is, or even if you can, don't worry about
it); and in Metafont, a bit of memory was leaked when a pencircle was
transformed "into an axially symmetric pen whose polygon has no point on
the $x$-axis".

An article in the next TUGboat will have all the details. As Knuth says:
> Users can rest assured that I haven't ``broken'' anything in this
> round of improvements. Everyone can upgrade at their convenience.

The TeX Live development sources will updated in due time, and the TL'14
release will contain the new versions.  There is no need for updates
in the distributed versions before then.

For those who want to look for themselves, the original source for
Knuth's files is ftp://ftp.stanford.edu/pub/tex/tex14.tar.gz.  (You can
compare to the tex08.tar.gz, etc., that are in the same directory.)  On
CTAN, the directory is systems/knuth/dist.

Thanks as ever, Don.

Respectfully submitted,
Karl Berry (just the release droid)