What’s new in babel 3.52

2020-12-16

⚠ If you upgrade babel and you need afrikaans you must upgrade babel-dutch, too.

Improvements in \babel(pre|post)hyphenation

There is a couple of new keys (penalty and insert) for the replacement items, which are useful not only for hyphenated languages, but also in CJK and Southeast Asian scripts to fine tune line breaking in special cases.

The code has been refactored and in many cases there will be a huge speed boost (×10 in some tests). The main bottleneck is still 1-∞ (ie, a multiletter string).

Penalties

Penalties can be inserted with both \babelprehyphenation and \babelposthyphenation with the key penalty, which can be combined (and usually must be) with insert (described below). Since in \babelprehyphenation | stands for a space, you can prevent, for example, the word «a» from being at the beginning of a line with:

\babelprehyphenation{english}{|a|}{
 {insert, penalty=10000},
 {}, {}, {}}

Inserted items

A new key insert adds the node before the ‘current’ one, instead of replacing it. It must be the first key in the replacement item specification and works not only with the new penalty but also with discretionaries (the latter only with \babelposthyphenation). The example above matches 3 items, but there are 4 replacements, so that ‹space-“a”-space› becomes ‹penalty-space-“a”-space›. ⚠ There is currently a limitation, yet – only an item can be inserted at each matched item (in this example, you cannot insert, say, another penalty before the first space). [Update. The limitation was lifted in 3.56.]

Fixes

• A couple of issues with \localeinfo and \getlocaleproperty (#102, #105).
• Save size overflow with many \selectlanguage’s (#109).
• Albanian: fix a typo in contents name (#104).
• Missing ‘Unused global option(s)’ warning (#110).