What’s new in babel 24.11

2024-10-05

Manual thoroughly revised

The manual is still being refined, but many outdated comments have been revised or directly deleted, sections restructured, and certain explanations expanded. Additionally, a greater number of examples have been included.

The design has also changed slightly — names of macros and environments are no longer placed in the margins.

Transform variables

Previously, values for some transforms were fixed in the ini files and unchangeable. A new feature has now been introduced to allow adjustments (specifically numeric parameters in prehyphenation). While no ini file has been altered yet, updates for Chinese languages (to align margins correctly), Japanese (also small kana), French (spacing with punctuation), and Tibetan (for traditional text justification) are planned for the near future.

This applies solely to numeric parameters in prehyphenation.

In the transforms section of ìni files, a value of {<variable-name>|<default>} employs the variable as set by \SetTransformValue{<locale-name>}{<variable-name>}{<value>}. If the variable is undefined (or its value is nil), the default is used instead.

Other changes

Updated the internal list of RTL scripts to add Garay, Todhri, Elymaic, Yazidi, and a few more.