What’s new in babel 25.15

2025-11-09

Improvements in Greek

Unicode engines

Now, greek, polytonicgreek, ancientgreek and the new monotonicgreek employ by default a combination of the corresponding ldf and ini files with Unicode engines (the now discouraged xelatex and the recommended lualatex), to fix a wrong rendering of diacritics (#363).

Dates

3 variants of the gregorian calendar are now available with the ini mechanism:

• greek, monotonicgreek and polytonicgreek prints by default the numbers with Arabic digits, but the letters variant prints them with the lower.modern counter.
• ancientgreek uses by default the lower.ancient counter (with stigma), but Arabic ones are also available with the digits variant. Of course, gregorian dates with Ancient Greek (to 1453, according to the IANA) is somewhat anachronistic.
• In addition, ionian, available in all locales, uses the ionian counter (see next section).

The Julian calendar (still in use) and some old Greek calendars are under study.

Ionian numerals

With the ini mechanism, instead of the ad hoc macro \greeknumeral, you can also use \localenumeral and \localecounter. Its name is ionian, so that

\localenumeral{ionian}{996}

will print ϡϟϛʹ. In addition, the numbers 6, 90 and 900 can be redefined with \BabelGreekNumeralVI, \BabelGreekNumeralXC and \BabelGreekNumeralCM as shown:

\renewcommand\BabelGreekNumeralXC{ϙ}

With it, the previous example will print ϡϙϛʹ.

Attic numerals

There is a new counter with the ini mechanism, named attic. It requires a font with the corresponding acrophonic numerals, like NewComputerModern10, FreeSerif or Cardo.

A couple of tips

Remember counters can be configured. Here is an example:

\usepackage[greek,
  provide={
    counters/lower.ancient.2 = ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ϙ,
    date.gregorian/date.long={[d|lower.ancient] [MMMM] [y|lower.ancient]}}
]{babel}

The 90 is now a koppa (ϙ) with the lower.ancient counter and the day and the year are printed in those numerals (which means a stigma for the 6).

You can also define your own additive counters (the example is now with \babelprovide):

\babelprovide[
  counters/nokeraia.1  = α β γ δ ε στ ζ η θ,
  counters/nokeraia.2  = ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ϟ,
  counters/nokeraia.3  = ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω ϡ,
  counters/nokeraia.4 = ͵α ͵β ͵γ ͵δ ͵ε ͵στ ͵ζ ͵η ͵θ
]{greek}

\babelfont, extended syntax

Initially, the syntax for \setmainfont and friends was \setmainfont[options]{font}, and the order of arguments with \babelfont was similar. Some time ago, the recommended syntax was changed to \setmainfont{font}[options], but babel didn’t follow it, which was an anomaly. Now, \babelfont[lang]{fam}{font}[options] is also valid.

Fixes in transforms

The{HHHH} syntax didn’t work in the last argument of a map with {n|..|..}. There were also some issues with special characters like braces or the hash (i.e., {007b}, {007d}, {0023}). They have been sorted out.

Other changes

Fix the glossary name in Turkish (thanks to @siaeyy).

An internal change is the creation of a new folder in the locale directory named invalid. It contains files with names invalid in the ini mechanism, but still necessary for the ldf mechanism, either for backward compatibility (e.g., samin) or because of some legacy behavior (e.g., ngerman).

There are also some readjustments in some of the messages shown.