This increase in the range of applications of LATEX has highlighted certain limitations of the current system, both for authors of documents and for designers of styles.
In addition to the need to extend the variety of classes of document which can be processed by LATEX, substantial enhancements are necessary in, at least, the following areas:
Further analysis of these deficiencies has shown that some of the problems are to be found in LATEX's internal concepts and design. This project to produce a new version therefore involves thorough research into the challenges posed by new applications and by the use of LATEX as a formatter for SGML documents.
This will result in a major re-implementation of large parts of the system. The recently released new standard LATEX already incorporates some of the results of such rethinking of the fundamentals, notably in the following areas: