What’s new in babel 25.6

2025-03-27

Transforms

The input.nospaces transform provides a convenient way to input text by removing spaces and line breaks between two CJK characters (but not between a Latin, Cyrillic, etc., character and a CJK one).

The transform spacing.basic for Chinese and Japanese has undergone thorough revision and is now considered essentially stable. As its name suggests, it provides a basic, general-purpose set of rules that deliver on average a reasonably result across various fonts. The new transform settings have been tested on approximately 80 CJK fonts.

One issue is the design of certain characters, such as quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation marks, can vary. Additionally, the full-width colon and semicolon may exhibit different visual appearances. This transform assumes:

• Left-aligned periods and commas (e.g., 、。).
• Full-width question and exclamation marks. However, these marks may vary in design, appearing as left-aligned, narrow centered, or wide centered. Lines ending with ? or ! can appear slightly short in certain fonts (e.g., Noto). To address this, the microtype package can be used; for example:

  \usepackage[protrusion=true, expansion=false]{microtype}
  \SetProtrusion{ encoding = TU }{？={,100}}
  

• Full-width quotation marks. Proportional marks can be ‘converted’ to full width with:

  \babelposthyphenation{japanese}{ “ }{
  { insert, norule = .5 0 0},
  {}
  }
  \babelposthyphenation{japanese}{ ” }{
  { after, norule = .5 0 0},
  {}
  }
  

• Centered colon and semicolon. For left-aligned designs, lines may appear slightly short. An option is to ‘convert’ them to centered designs with:

  \babelposthyphenation{japanese}{ [：；] }{
  { insert, norule = .25 0 0},
  { after,  norule = -.25 0 0},
  {}
  }
  

  Sadly, microtype is of no help in the latter case, because the line ends with a kern, not with a glyph (there are hacks, but, well, they are hacks).

Directive @include

To reduce many duplicated declarations (and simplify maintenance), an @include directive has been added to the ini mechanism. When @include = <name> is encountered, babel reads the file babel-<name>.ini. The <name> must not resemble that of an ini locale file. It has been devised mainly for transforms. See the locale files for Japanese, Arabic and Sanskrit for examples.