Direc­tory macros/latex/required/babel/base

Babel 3.12
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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.

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 pre-release of the new ini files (for about 200
languages) to be used in forthcoming versions. They are currenly not
used, but this way they can be fine-tuned before the final release
(they are based mainly on the CLDR, and some settings are not well
suited for fine typesetting).

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.

Please, report bugs and suggestions to:

http://latex-project.org/bugs-upload.html

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.

Recent changes
--------------

[3.12 - No real changes in the babel core. Just a few technical changes
        related to the files.]

3.11  - Fix - error when version in format and of package
        didn't match.
      - Now switch.def is loaded always.
      - First steps in bidi writing.

3.10  - New versioning
      - New macro - \babelprovide

3.9t  - Part of the code for 3.10 ss has been "back-ported" to this
        release, but they are only internal changes.
      - Fix - with \babelhyphen{soft} the hyphen could vanish.
      - English, Indonesian and Malay "dialects" now rely on the proxy
        files provided by these languages (eg, american.ldf, melayu.ldf).
	If you upgrade babel, you MUST upgrade those languages, too.
	
3.9s  - Bug fix - extra spaces with \babelensure

3.9r  - The three main dtx files now share version numbers.
      - bbunicode - Fixed a line break at \cs{foreignlanguage} with
        unloaded patterns. Also added \babelcatcodetablenum, just in
	case.
	
3.9q  - base now reads patterns in lua
      - Some minor changes for luatex

*** Babel 3.9o and 3.9p are deprecated ***

------------
Javier Bezos
2017/06/29