What’s new in babel 3.42

2020-03-22

Getting properties from ini files

Let’s say you need the string for the chapter name in Hebrew. You can write:

\getlocaleproperty{\hechap}{hebrew}{captions/chapter}

And \hechap is set to the corresponding value.

\LocaleForEach loops the loaded ini files with #1 as the locale name. Here is a somewhat low level example:

\LocaleForEach{%
  \getlocaleproperty\savetag{#1}{identification/tag.bcp47}%
  \expandafter\xdef\csname tagtolocale\savetag\endcsname{#1}%
}

[Update. This command raises an error if the property doesn’t exist. \getlocaleproperty* doesn’t.]

Coptic, Church Slavic, Syriac, Armenian, Sanskrit

ini files for 3 locales have been added:

• Coptic, with 2 numerals: epact and lower.letters.
• Church Slavic, in 3 scripts: the ‘default’ Cyrl, plus Cyrs and Glag
• Syriac. See an example in https://github.com/latex3/babel/blob/master/samples/lua-syriac.pdf .

Armenian now has captions and numerals. [Warning. There are also numerals, but their names are not correct: they are lower and upper, but must be lower.letters and upper.letters. It will be fixed in the next release. Sorry for the slip.][Fixed]

A few mistakes has been fixed in Sanskrit and Belarusian.

Also, a new property named tag.bcp47.likely has been added to many locales, based on the Unicode data.

Improved line breaking with xetex

It should work with most South East Asian, Indic and CJK languages supported by XeTeX.

Fixes

• The main fix is a bug introduced in 3.41, an extra space with languages loaded on the fly.
• Line breaking was no always correct with languages loaded on the fly.
• Avoid a harmless warning about redefining a protected command (#52).
• Locale was not switched correctly with COMBINING characters (#54).