What’s new in babel 24.4

2024-04-20

New ‘interchar’ for CJK

There is a new interchar available in Cantonese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean named linebreak.basic. By default (plain) xetex loads a set of settings for the CJK scripts, but not xelatex. What this option does is to load them. There are a couple of macros to set the glue and the space inserted between characters when appropriate:

• \BabelCJKGlue (by default \hskip0pt plus 0.1em\relax)
• \BabelCJKSpace (by default \hskip0.2em plus 0.2em minus 0.1em\relax)

While this ‘interchar’ is locale dependent (and it can be enabled and disabled with \enablelocaleinterchar and \disablelocaleinterchar), these two macros are shared by the CJK languages. However, you can set different values on a locale basis by means of the standard babel mechanisms (\extras... or \AddBabelHook).

Fixes

The algorithm for Tibetan line breaking has been improved to take into account closing punctuation.

Other changes

\IfBabelIntercharT is not executed directly, but delayed to a better place.