UK TeX FAQ -- question label LaTeX3

### The LaTeX project

The LaTeX project team (see http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html) is a small group of volunteers whose aim is to produce a major new document processing system based on the principles pioneered by Leslie Lamport in the current LaTeX. The new system is (provisionally) called LaTeX3; it will remain freely available and it will be fully documented at all levels.

The LaTeX team’s first product (LaTeX2e) was delivered in 1994 (it’s now properly called “LaTeX”, since no other version is current).

LaTeX2e was intended as a consolidation exercise, unifying several sub-variants of LaTeX while changing nothing whose change wasn’t absolutely necessary. This has permitted the team to support a single version of LaTeX, in parallel with development of LaTeX3.

Some of the older discussion papers about directions for LaTeX3 are to be found on CTAN; other (published) articles are to be found on the project web site (http://www.latex-project.org/papers/), as is some of the project’s experimental code (see http://www.latex-project.org/code.html, which allows you to read the project’s source repository); a recent snapshot of two major collections from the code, expl3 and xpackages, are available. Contributed code, such as keys3 (for key-value argument decoding) and numparse3 (for number processing) are available in the CTAN ‘LaTeX experimental’ tree.

You can participate in discussions of the future of LaTeX through the mailing list `latex-l`. Subscribe to the list by sending a message ‘`subscribe latex-l <your name>`’ to listserv@urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de

`expl3 bundle`
  macros/latex/contrib/expl3 (or browse the directory)
`keys3.sty`
  macros/latex/exptl/keys3 (or browse the directory)
`LaTeX project publications`
  info/ltx3pub (or browse the directory)
`xpackages bundle`
  macros/latex/contrib/xpackages (or browse the directory)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=LaTeX3