What’s new in babel 3.64

2021-10-13

Changes in the preliminary code for LaTeX hooks

⚠ Following some changes in the LaTeX mechanism itself, the interface in babel has been modified. See the news for version 3.62.

Changes in ini files

New counters in CJK

Some new counters has been added to the CJK languages. For Chinese and Korean:

• circled.ideograph: ㊀ ㊁ ㊂ ㊃ ㊄ ㊅ ㊆ ㊇ ㊈ ㊉
• parenthesized.ideograph: ㈠ ㈡ ㈢ ㈣ ㈤ ㈥ ㈦ ㈧ ㈨ ㈩

And for Japanese, these two counters and also:

• cjk-earthly-branch: 子 丑 寅 卯 辰 巳 午 未 申 酉 戌 亥
• cjk-heavenly-stem: 甲 乙 丙 丁 戊 己 庚 辛 壬 癸

Norwegian

The names and tags for Norwegian have been aligned with the CLDR 39. Particularly, no is now the main language and it’s the locale loaded with norwegian.

Revert fix for \selectlanguage

In version 3.61 there was a partial fix for the \write issue with \selectlanguage (see \selectlanguage pushes section to new page). As explained in the news page for that release “the fix is not perfect and it can even lead to some problems”, but it was introduced in the hope these problems will be less frequent and not too serious. Sadly, it has turned out it was not so.

The previous behavior has been restored, but it can be configured in the following way:

• \babeladjust{ select.write = shift }, which shifts the skips down and adds a \penalty.
• \babeladjust{ select.write = keep }, which is again the default behavior. With it the \write and the skips are kept in the order they are written.
• \babeladjust{ select.write = omit } may seem a too drastic solution, because \selectlanguage doesn’t write anything, but more often than not this command is applied to more or less shorts texts with no sectioning or similar commands and therefore no language synchronization is necessary.

I think this issue must be considered a ‘known issue’, because it seems unfixable (except, perhaps, by manipulating the vertical list with luatex).

Fixes

• Babel errors on document option chinese (#141)

• In some ini files multiple babel.name’s were separated keys with a suffix (A, B, etc.), and in some other they were grouped in a single key with a space-separated list. Now only the latter system (a single key) is used (#149).

Other changes

An internal change is now babel.sty and babel.def are separate files for LaTeX and Plain-based formats, respectively. So far, babel.sty loaded partially babel.def.

(⚠ Undo in version 3.65.) The options manager for languages (the way babel processes the language options declared in the package or the class) has been rewritten. In some cases the order languages are loaded may be different (except the main language, of course), but I don’t think there will be any real problems.