What’s new in babel 26.11

2026-08-21

Chinese counters

Two new counters have been added to Chinese, which are locale-dependent (simplified and traditional). They are named informal and formal, and correspond to the CSS counters named simp-chinese-informal, simp-chinese-formal, trad-chinese-informal, trad-chinese-formal.

They are used like other localized counters; e.g., \localenumeral{informal}{23}. As other counters defined via ini files, their range is 1-9999 (0 is also allowed) and they are fully expandable if in range. Remember in dates there is a special syntax (see the manual): [d|informal] means the day in the informal counter. They are available in xetex and luatex.

For a different solution, have a look at zhnumber.

Technical note. The new counters are declared in the ini files with the special suffixes D (digits 1 to 9) and C (complementary) as illustrated:

informal.D = 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九
informal.C = 零 负 十 百 千

Items are separated with spaces and the complementary characters follow this order: zero, negative (currently unused), tens, hundreds, thousands.

Indian calendar

The official Indian National Calendar (Saka era) is now available in the following locales, for xelatex and lualatex:

Assamese, Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kangri, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu

Here is an example, which sets it as the default calendar. It prints ‘२४ श्रावण १९४८’:

\documentclass{article}

\year=2026 \month=8 \day=15

\usepackage[hindi, provide={mapdigits, calendar=indian}]{babel}
\babelfont{rm}{Mukta}

\begin{document}

\today

\end{document}

Fixes

• The syntax \AddToHook{babel/*/<event>} was not working correctly.
• Locales could be repeated in \LocaleForEach.