Over the years many extensions have been developed for LATEX. This is, of course, a sure sign of its continuing popularity but it has had one unfortunate result: incompatible LATEX formats came into use at different sites. Thus, to process documents from various places, a site maintainer was forced to keep LATEX (with and without ), , , and so on. In addition, when looking at a source file it was not always clear for which format the document was written.
To put an end to this unsatisfactory situation a new release of LATEX was produced. It brings all such extensions back under a single format and thus prevents the proliferation of mutually incompatible dialects of LATEX 2.09. The new release was available for several months as a test version, and the final release of 1 June officially replaces the old version.