What’s new in babel 24.13

2024-11-08

There are important news related to the LaTeX kernel, which affects how to deal with languages. Now, according to Engine news from the LaTeX Project, “LuaTeX is the recommended engine for all new documents”. Furthermore, “it is time to move away from XeTeX: certainly for new documents, and even for existing ones”.

Here is a document (still a draft) with some hints on how to migrate from xetex to luatex.

Work is underway to provide short examples in many languages. See Index of locale guides

French: Transform variables

When the ini file is used, you can now configure the spacing with punctuation, with the new transform variables. See What’s new in 24.11.

Variables are:

• guillemet.natural, guillemet.plus, guillemet.minus
• colon.natural, colon.plus, colon.minus
• high.natural, high.plus, high.minus

With, for example:

\SetTransformValue{french}{colon.natural}{.8}

spacing with the colon is slightly smaller (default is 1). Unit is the current ordinary space.

Pashto: Persian and Islamic calendars

Added strings for the those calendars in the locale for Pashto. Since the default calendar was Persian, an error was even raised (which is now fixed).

Emtpy strings has been added to Mazanderani and Northern Luri, which also require the Persian calendar. Sadly, the Unicode CLDR doesn’t define them yet. Feel free to contribute them.

Fixes

• Uyghur hyphenation mechanism stopped working.
• The Hebrew calendar converter raised an error.