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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label TeXfuture</title>
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<h3>What is the future of TeX?</h3>
<p>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&rsquo;s latest release is version
3.141592).  Knuth wants TeX to be frozen at version pi when he
dies; thereafter, no further changes may be made to Knuth&rsquo;s source.
(A similar rule is applied to Metafont; its version number tends to the
limit e, and currently stands at 2.71828.)
<p>Knuth explains his decision, and exhorts us all to respect it, in a
paper originally published in <i>TUGboat</i> 11(4) (and reprinted in the

<a href="http://www.ntg.nl/maps/pdf/5_34.pdf">NTG journal MAPS</a>).
<p>There are projects (some of them long-term
projects: see, for example,
<a href="FAQ-LaTeX3.html">the LaTeX3 project</a>)

to build substantial
new macro packages based on TeX.  For the even longer term, there
are various projects to build a <em>successor</em> to TeX; see, for example,
the

<a href="FAQ-omegaleph.html">Omega/Aleph</a>
<a href="FAQ-extex.html">ExTeX</a>.
<p><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXfuture">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXfuture</a>
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