What’s new in babel 3.54

2021-02-22

The main change in this version is internal, with a refactoring of the loader of ini files.

Graphics

This section applies to luatex.

Graphical elements in bidi texts are particularly problematic because they must be LTR while the text can be RTL. In past versions, a basic support for the picture environment was provided, which unfortunately stopped working. Support for typical cases with pgfpicture (pgf/tikz) was added, too, which still works.

This version improves the situation and now RTL inside a \put in the picture environment is correctly detected and properly typeset, at least in typical cases. Requires pict2e. There is a minor caveat: the contents of \put are parsed twice in order to detect if it contains some RTL text, which means global assignments are executed also twice. This is, however, very infrequent.

Support for pgfpicture has been improved and now \tikz is recognized, too. Here is an example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[arabic, provide=*, bidi=basic]{babel}
\babelfont{rm}{FreeSerif}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary {shapes.misc}

\begin{document}

Hello
\tikz[baseline=(X.base)]
  \node [cross out,draw] (X) {واحد اثنين three أربعة.};

\end{document}

Fixes

The tentative macro \foreignlanguage* stopped working.