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I am in charge of maintaining a dozen LaTeX templates used in our section for writing corporate reports. Mostly text, simple math formulas and some tables. Artwork is done elsewhere and added to.

Custom templates are made using the report. The only packages used are fontenc, graphicx, xcolor, amsmath, geometry and inputenc. Also, each template has several new commands written in basic LaTeX.

The IT guys announced a major system upgrade to our windows based server, including a fresh install of LateX. That stresses me out a bit.

So far we are using pdflatex , version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.17 (preloaded format = pdflatex 2017.1.7)

Should I expect any problems afterwards?

I don't know how often LaTeX updates are released. Is there a preferable time of year to do a brand new installation (after all the wrinkles have been ironed out)?

Amélie Th
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  • latex is updated twice a year, and there have been many changes in the last years: You can check the ltnews for a list https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/. The majority of documents work fine after an update, but if you use outdated packages or patch internal commands you can get errors. I would therefore recommend to start testing as soon as possible. If you can't install a new system directly, use e.g. overleaf, which isn't completly up-to-date but should be ok for most cases. – Ulrike Fischer Jan 16 '23 at 15:22
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    Welcome to tex.sx, and good luck with the upgrade! (If I had this task -- and have been so involved in the past -- I would take advantage of the ability to have multiple generations of TeX Live "live" at once, using one for testing and the known stable one for production, How this is done depends on your hardware and operating system.) – barbara beeton Jan 16 '23 at 15:28
  • @Ulrike Fischer Thanks for your quick response. I work in a corporate network with no internet access so overleaf is out of the question. Nor I am allow to move documents to my personal device. – Amélie Th Jan 16 '23 at 15:30
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    then ask your IT for a local current texlive in some test environment. If your documents are as simple as you describe them, there shouldn't be much problems, but you shouldn't have to do such an update blindly. – Ulrike Fischer Jan 16 '23 at 15:38

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