What’s new in babel 24.12

2024-10-20

Manual revised (continued)

As in the previous version, outdated comments have been revised, certain explanations expanded, and examples added.

Multilingual document automation

One on the aims of babel is to ease its integration with automated document generation or conversion workflows (like Pandoc, Sphynx or Asciidoctor), and there has been steps in this direction with, for example, lazy loading of locales (not requiring explicit declaration in the preamble) and fonts (loaded only if actually used in the document), as well as BCP-47 tags. (If you are the maintainer of such a system, feel free to make feature requests or ask for help.)

There are now a couple of tools to preset the options for locales even before loading babel, by means of the LaTeX hooking mechanism.

The hook babel/presets is executed just before locale files (either ini or ldf) are loaded. Its functionality is, in fact, similar to the config files, but it’s executed a bit later and there is no need to a separate file.

\PassOptionsToLocale was devised for this hook and its purpose is what its name suggests. For example, you can write in a class (with luatex).

\AddToHook{babel/presets}{%
  \PassOptionsToLocale{mapdigits}{sanskrit}%
  \PassOptionsToLocale{transforms=punctuation.space}{french}%
}

Other candidates for babel/presets are \AfterBabelLanguage and \DeclareOption (although the latter can be somewhat dangerous).

Fixes

• Some numerals in Greek ini files printed the wrong stigma.
• Dates were missing with lazy locale loading.
• ‘Complex’ class options involving characters like =, {, }, mislead babel.