What’s new in babel 24.10

2024-09-18

⚠ For a few years now, a message has been reporting the syntax \selectlanguage{\<language>} (with a macro instead of a name) was deprecated. Now this syntax has been removed altogether.

\localename, \mainlocalename

Consider the following document:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\let\savelanguage\languagename
\begin{document}
\savelanguage$=$\languagename?
\ifx\savelanguage\languagename True\else False!?!?\fi
\end{document}

Is ‘english’ not the same as ‘english’? As explained in the manual, there was a bug in babel which messed up catcodes. No alternative was provided, but now there is one: \localename. The name of this macro follows the new paradigm in babel, based on the concept of ‘locale’ (like \localenumeral, \localedate, \localeinfo…).

In addition, there is a new macro named \mainlocalename, with the name of the main language. You can retrieve locale properties for the main language with, for example:

\getlocaleproperty\frtag{\mainlocalename}{captions/chapter}

They are not available in non-etex engines (pdftex, xetex, luatex and, of course, etex are).

\babelhyphenmins

There is a new command to deal with hyphenation in LaTeX (not available in Plain).

\babelhyphenmins*[<language-list>]{<left>}{<right>}[<hyphenationmin>]

The rationale behind this new command is hyphenmins are very often a stylistic choice. There are in fact three possible sets of values, which I’m going to illustrate with Spanish:

• A technical limit imposed by the patterns, especially when generated with patgen. This limit in Spanish is 1/1, because it includes patterns like 4b. and .b2. Sadly, this limit is often unknown or has been lost.
• The ‘traditional’ limit marked by typographical conventions in each country (very likely the same language). Note sometimes there is not a single convention even in the same country. In Spanish it’s 2/2.
• The layout. If the text box is wide, you can decide to raise the value to 3/2 or even 3/3.

Now, consider a document written in English with some words in other languages with lower values (in Greek it’s 1/1!). This will lead to undesired typographical inconsistencies. In other words, hyphenmins are language dependent only to some extent, and having a command to deal with them in a more general way can be useful.

This explains why the first argument with the language list is optional – you may want to set the same value for all languages.

The starred version not only adjust the settings in the locales, but also sets them at once (for a temporary local change). It’s not compatible with the first optional argument.

It’s worth noting the luatex parameter \hyphenationmin is language dependent in the TeX sense (it depends, globally, on the current \language), while \righthyphenmin and \lefthyphenmin are not (they depend only on the group). With this command its value can be unified in the whole document.