What’s new in babel 3.71

2022-02-13

⚠ Remember the luatex support for amsmath has not been finished. Expect some anomalous vertical skips in displays (partly due to a bug in luatex — a fix is on the way), even with the standard environments, and misplaced tags in some cases (for example, with aligned and gathered).

IAST transliteration for Sanskrit

This feature has been contributed by Maximilian Mehner. See radardenker/babel-iast.

Althought babel provided the Havard-Kyoto system, which requires only ASCII characters, the IAST system is being far more commonly used these days, thanks to Unicode.

The transliteration rules also standardize whitespace according to the convention of Devanagari, in which — at least for Sanskrit — no closing consonants are written with a stop sign if a vowel or consonant follows in the sentence or verse line. So for example you would write ‘tat sad iti’ in IAST as well as Harvard-Kyoto, but the correct Devanagari would be तत्सदिति all under one line giving the impression of a single word. Most transliteration tools would transliterate ‘tat sad iti’ to तत् सद् इति, so require you to input ‘tatsaditi’ to achieve the correct output, but this is in itself a faulty romanization.

Full stop (.) and slash (/) both get replaced by danda (।), two of either by double-danda (॥). Colon (:) gets replaced by dash (–) which is commonly used in Devanagari editions of dramas in this function.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[english]{babel}

\babelprovide[import=sa, transforms=transliteration.iast]{iast}
\babelfont[iast]{rm}[Renderer=Harfbuzz]{DevanagariMT}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\begin{document}
\begin{otherlanguage}{iast}
  divi bhūmau tathākāśe bahir antaś ca me vibhuḥ /\\
  yo 'vabhāty avabhāsātmā ss tasmai viśvātmane namaḥ // 1.1
\end{otherlanguage}
\end{document}

Fixes

• provide+=* didn’t work with hebrew as a secondary language.

• (lua) Wrong equation direction in ‘cases’ and ‘array’ (#167). The latter was a long standing problem, which was even mentioned as a known issue in the manual. Fixing it was not trivial, and a radically new approach to fix math typesetting in bidi texts, written in lua, has been devised. If it does the trick, this mechanism (which is similar to that already applied to picture, and part of the code is actually shared) will be fine tuned and extended in future releases.

• (lua) Bad interraction between bidi option and mathtools, which raised an error (#166). It’s related to the work in progress to improve math typesetting.