They say a lot of things about releasing software. I’ve got many things running through my head right now. It’s never been like this before. I’m pretty pleased to have just sent into CTAN my latest, and also largest ever, LaTeX package.

I’ve been working on unicode-math since 2006, before XeTeX had math support and my preliminary efforts, I think, convinced Jonathan Kew to add it. The years since then have been a blur of too many commitments and missed deadlines. About nine months ago I took some time off my PhD to seriously attack this code that had been on its way to being complete for far too long. And then got side-tracked again…

But in the process of doing all that work I also sent in an abstract to speak at the 2010 TeX Users Group conference (TUG 2010), which not only locked me in to travelling overseas when my financial situation isn’t the greatest, but also guaranteed that I’d actually be finishing this work at some point. No damn way am I going to be talking about work that you can’t go out and touch.

Hence, in a few hours (or however long it takes for the daemon to wake up) this package will be part of CTAN and in turn part of TeX Live 2010. And doesn’t it feel great to get to this stage. There’s still the extra work required for supporting the STIX fonts properly, and bugs to be fixed and features added, but none of them matter right now.

Next up: oh, don’t get me started. I’m leaving the country in less than two weeks and I’ve got way to much to do, still.