What’s new in babel 25.11

2025-07-13

This is a minor release, mainly with some internal changes.

Preparing locale files for the new loader

The changes for the new language loader has no effect yet. They introduce a revised loading behavior for languages with ‘traditional’ (ldf) babel support. Previously, the system would first load the ldf file and then obtain information from babel-<name>.tex and the babel-<tag>.ini. The updated loading process will invert this order: it will initially attempt to load babel-<name>.tex, which will then select either the .ldf file (with some required additional info from the ini file) or the .ini data.

When making tests during the preparation of these initial changes, several findings emerged:

• Some languages (bulgarian, belarusian, georgian, macedonian) raise an error when "= is followed by a non-fully expandable token (e.g., "="). This token is directly passed to an \if, which is not a good idea.
• macedonian sets the font encoding in a very non-standard way, incompatible with Unicode engines. With the latter, a mixture of ldf and ini data will be used.

Fixes

• import in \PassOptionsToLocale raised an error with lazy loading.

Other changes

• Not really a fix, but more an ‘anti-fix’. The tags de-AT and de-AT-1996 are now linked to naustrian. The real fix would be to rename the babel style, which doesn’t conform the language naming conventions (austrian is assigned to de-AT-1901, the pre-1996 orthography).