What’s new in babel 25.9

2025-05-14

⚠ Important announcement about an upcoming change. Plans are underway for next fall or winter to eliminate the need to explicitly specify provide= when loading a language not supported as an ldf, thereby unifying the interface. Depending on the language (and possibly the engine), babel will select the most suitable method. See this post in tex.stackexchange.

Prepending transforms

Until now, transforms could be only added after all the previouly defined ones. However, particularly with predefined transform, adding them before other transforms can be useful. A new prepend option does that. For example:

\babelprehyphenation[prepend]{hebrew}{-}{ string = ־ } % hyphen → maqaf

New options for layout

The layout key now includes a couple of new options, although they do not introduce new functionality. When this key is used with any options in bidi documents, there are a few changes in \@hangfrom and also (only xelatex, as it’s unnecesary in lualatex) in \raggedright and \raggedleft. Using pars applies these adjustments even without other options; conversely, nopars prevents these adjustments even when other options are specified.

\BabelFootnote

This tool is now available always, across all engines. Previously, it was restricted to documents using the bidi option. There is no inherent reason to limit this feature to bidirectional texts. For instance, it can be useful in a Bulgarian document containing French citations, where the footnotes should remain in Bulgarian.

This change also fixes the issue #324.