What’s new in babel 26.12

2026-09-09

The PDF with the manual is now partially tagged for accesibility.

Pinyin

There is a new locale for Chinese pinyin. Its name, following the conventions in Locale naming, is chinese-pinyin. The BCP 47 tag, as recommended by the IANA, is zh-Latn-pinyin.

Tone can me marked with numbers and converted to characters with diacritics with the transform tone.numeric. For example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[chinese-pinyin, provide={transforms=tone.numeric}]{babel}

\begin{document}

Pin1yin1 shi4 Zhong1wen2 de1 Han4zi4 biao1yin1 xi4tong3. Ta1 yong4
La1ding1 zi4mu3 he2 shu4zi4 lai2 biao3shi4 Han4yu3 de1 fa1yin1 he2
sheng1diao4.

\end{document}

\today with external converters

Now they can be used when setting the default date format for the locale. First, an example with the built-in converter in babel, with the Indian National Calendar (luatex and xetex):

\documentclass{article}

% Set a fixed day for this example
\year=2026 \month=8 \day=15

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

\begin{document}

\today

\end{document}

And now with a converter from calendrica, which still uses the strings for the indian calendar (only luatex):

\documentclass{article}

% Set a fixed day for this example
\year=2026 \month=8 \day=15

\usepackage[hindi, provide={calendar=indian.calendrica:hindu-solar}]{babel}
\babelfont{rm}{Mukta}

\begin{document}

\today

\end{document}

Using calendrica with the gregorian calendar strings is possible. Just leave out the calendar name and keep the converter.

Known issues

• \\ between digits messes up the text direction. A workaround is \\\babelsublr{}

Fixes

• Wrong direction in amstex \text inside \[…\] in RTL mode.