What’s new in babel 25.16

2025-11-23

Julian calendar

Currently there are only declarations for greek, monotonicgreek and polytonicgreek (although it’s possible to create the corresponding declarations in other locales). Years begin on January 1st (dual dates not yet supported). Requires the ini mechanism and a Unicode engine.

Here are examples showing how to set the calendar globally for polytonicgreek:

\documentclass{article}

\year=2025 \month=6 \day=15

\usepackage
  [polytonicgreek,
   provide={calendar=julian}
  {babel}
  
\babelfont{rm}{FreeSerif}

\begin{document}

\today

\end{document}

prints:

2 Ἰουνίου 2025

With

\usepackage
  [polytonicgreek,
   provide={calendar=julian.letters}
  {babel}

it prints:

βʹ Ἰουνίου ͵βκεʹ

Counters without keraia

Contributed by Nikos Platis and named lower.modern.nonumeralsign and upper.modern.nonumeralsign. With greek, monotonicgreek and polytonicgreek.

Other changes

Many unnecessary \space’s have been removed from the ini files.