What is the future of TeX?
Knuth has declared that he will do no further development of TeX;
he will continue to fix any bugs that are reported to him (though
bugs are rare). This decision was made soon after
TeX version 3.0 was released; at each bug-fix release
the version number acquires one more digit, so that it tends to the
limit pi (at the time of writing, Knuth’s latest release
is version 3.1415926). Knuth wants TeX to be frozen at
version pi when he dies; thereafter, no further changes
may be made to Knuth’s source. (A similar rule is applied to Metafont;
its version number tends to the limit e, and currently
stands at 2.718281.)
Knuth explains his decision, and exhorts us all to respect it, in a
paper originally published in
TUGboat 11(4),
and reprinted in the
NTG journal MAPS.
There are projects (some of them long-term
projects: see, for example,
the LaTeX3 project)
to build substantial
new macro packages based on TeX. For the even longer term, there
are various projects to build a successor to TeX. The
e-TeX extension to TeX itself arose from such a
project (NTS). Another pair of projects, which have delivered
all the results they are likely to deliver, is the related
Omega and Aleph. The
XeTeX system is in principle still under
development, but is widely used, and the
LuaTeX project (though with another two years of
development scheduled) has already delivered a system that is quite
useful.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXfuture