What’s new in babel 3.38

2020-01-15

Automatic switching of locale and fonts (lua)

Sometimes, you need to insert short pieces of text in a different script from the main one – for example, some Japanese words inside Bulgarian. Now, identifiers (\language and \localeid, which apply currently to line breaking) and fonts can be automatically set based on script blocks, without explicit mark up (only luatex). A full example is:

\documentclass{article}

% Load russian and english
\usepackage[russian,english]{babel}

% Switch \language and \localeid, and fonts with Russian chars
\babelprovide[onchar=ids fonts]{russian}

% Set font for russian, as the default one only covers the Latin
% script.
\babelfont[russian]{rm}{CMU Serif Roman}

\begin{document}

% Comment the following line out to see hyphenation points:
% \hsize1pt

For example, мороз (‘frost’) is transliterated \textit{moroz}, and мышь
(‘mouse’), \textit{mysh}.

From Wikipedia.

\end{document}

Public access to locale info in ini files

Until now, the information in the identification section was stored in ‘private’ macros (ie, with @’s). Now, they are exposed with the command \localeinfo, which is fully expandable, provided the value exists (it raises an error otherwise). For example, to get the locale code:

\localeinfo{tag.bcp47}

See the manual for the full list.