What’s new in babel 24.9

2024-08-29

Counters

(LuaLaTeX.) Now localized counters are also available as transforms, with name digits.native. It’s an alternative to mapdigits, which the advantage it can be enabled and disabled in the middle of the paragraph.

CJK spacing and line breaking

A couple of tentative transforms apply rules to follow some common conventions in Chinese and Japanese (currently only locales jp and zh).

• linebreak.strict (only Japanese) prevents line breaks before small kana variants.

• spacing.basic trims some characters at the start and end of the line, for they to get visually aligned to the margin, and reduces the space between some characters (eg, ）。), by inserting a negative kern of −.5 em.

Note currently spacing.basic assumes punctuation marks (comma, colon, period, etc.) are visually aligned in the font to the left inside the character block (eg, Noto JP and SC). Centered punctuation (eg, Noto TC and HK) will be addressed in a future release (including middle dot).

Also, although it is barely noticeable, the tiny spaces inserted for justification are missing in these transforms. This limitation will be fixed in the next releases and a way to configure the values of kerns and spaces will be added (in general for transforms, not only CJK).