Direc­tory macros/latex/required/babel/base

Ba­bel 3.23

This pack­age man­ages cul­tur­ally-de­ter­mined ty­po­graph­i­cal (and other) rules, and hy­phen­ation pat­terns for a wide range of lan­guages. Many lan­guage styles work with pdfla­tex, as well as with xe­la­tex and lu­ala­tex out of the box. A few even work with plain for­mats.

The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion is avail­able on https://ctan.org/pkg/ba­bel.

Ver­sion 3.9a fixed lots of bugs and added some new fea­tures, in­tended mainly to make it com­pat­i­ble some­how with Uni­code en­gines. Some bugs have not been fixed to avoid back­ward in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ties, but they have been doc­u­mented. Most of the new fea­tures (like pack­age op­tions) were in­tended to over­come is­sues in pre­vi­ous re­leases with­out chang­ing sig­nif­i­cantly the be­haviour of Ba­bel.

Cur­rent de­vel­op­ment is fo­cused on Uni­code en­gines (XeTeX and LuaTeX). New fea­tures re­lated to font se­lec­tion, bidi writ­ing and the like will be added in­cre­men­tally. Ver­sions num­bers drop the let­ter and now 3.10, 3.11, etc., will be used in­stead. So, 3.9t is the last in the for­mer se­ries.

In­cluded is a set of ini files for about 200 lan­guages.

Lan­guages are not part of the Ba­bel core any more; in par­tic­u­lar, it shall be no longer nec­es­sary to syn­chro­nize Ba­bel core re­leases with re­leases of Ba­bel lan­guage files. See CONTRIB for fur­ther de­tails about con­tribut­ing a lan­guage. You may also cre­ate an ini file or im­prove the ex­ist­ing ones – it's a triv­ial task (no pro­gram­ming skills re­quired at all), but don't hes­i­tate to ask for help.

The best way to in­stall and/or up­date it is with the help of pack­age man­agers.

Changes are de­scribed in ba­bel.pdf with the la­bel "New <ver­sion>". The man­ual has been ex­panded to in­clude some tips and tricks, but it will be im­proved in next re­leases.

Re­port­ing Bugs

If you wish to re­port a prob­lem or bug in any of these pack­ages please use the Is­sue Tracker for LaTeX2ε on GitHub and fol­low the guide­lines that pop up if you press the New issue but­ton.

In par­tic­u­lar, to check that you are re­ally see­ing a bug, please write a short, self-con­tained doc­u­ment that shows the prob­lem. This should in­clude the latexbug pack­age, which will warn if your test file is not suit­able for one or the other rea­son. See the CONTRIBUTING guide for fur­ther de­tails, or if you need to ob­tain the latexbug pack­age.

If the bug turns out to be with third-party soft­ware then please con­tact the de­vel­oper, and not us!

You may also re­port them to the au­thor more in­for­mally on:

http://www.tex­nia.com/con­tact.html

Bugs re­lated to spe­cific lan­guages are best re­ported to their re­spec­tive au­thors.

Lat­est changes

3.23   - After extensive tests and fixing some issues, bidi=basic is 
         not experimental any longer.
       - import in \babelprovide does not require a language code if
         the language name is a recognized one.
       - New macro: \ifbabelshorthand.
       - TS1, T3 and TS3 have been added to the non-ascii list, to 
         avoid problems in case no ASCII-savvy encoding is requested.
       - Define Language and Script if fontspec does not known them (eg, 
         the Japanese script).
       - Set the \thepage bidi bahavior in foots/heads.
       - Fix - Undefined \bbl@stripslash in Plain.
3.22   - Fix - Error with \chapter if empty in ini
       - Prelimimary support for Sanskrit
       - Unknown languages in aux files do not raise an error
         any more (only show a warning).
3.21   - Fix - equation numbers raised an error.
       - Two minor changes: if no language is requested load nil 
         instead of raising an error, and the message 'babel <x.x>...'
         is not printed to the log any more.
3.20   - ini files with the field digits.native define
         \<language>digits and \<language>counters. \arabic can be
         redefined to use native digits.
       - Fix - mapfont in bidi=basic didn't take into account combining
         marks (eg, Arabic vowels).
       - Fix - A bug introduced in 3.19, which sometimes reversed text 
         in \hbox'es.
       - Fix for luatex 1.07 - An internal change in luatex broke
         bidi at 'automatic' hyphens.
       - Fix for latest latex - babel.ins raised an error.
3.19   - Most changes are for luatex:
         . The main new feature is a bidi method for both implicit L in
           R text, and implicit R in L text, with the possibility of
           switching the font automatically. Still somewhat
           experimental, but it should work in most cases.
         . layout=extras for a couple of miscellaneous readjustments.
         . bidi equation numbers.
       - Also, for all engines, new field in some ini files:
         digits.native (to be used in future releases).
         
3.18   - More bidi in luatex: captions (required only in multilingual
         docs) and tabular (required for R tables). Also an experimental
         support for captions in xetex and pdftex (tabular is not yet
         supported).
       - New ini files: ar-DZ, ar-MA, ar-SY
       - Fix - \begin{hyphenrules} didn't work with polyglossia.
       - Fix - switch.def was loaded twice.
       
3.17   - A tool for bidi footnotes.
       - Fix - \ragged... didn't work for bidi.
       
3.16   - New package option layout for bidi documents.
       - Quotes in TU encoding
       - Fix - \<language>date did not work correctly
       - Fix - with some languages (eg, british), using
         \babelfont raised an error.

Javier Be­zos 2018/09/02