What’s new in babel 3.84

2022-12-26

⚠ There are some issues with the new \MakeUppercase and \MakeLowercase. For further details, see:

Localization of \MakeUppercase and \MakeLowercase broken

Encodings with pdftex and \babelprovide

With pdftex, when a language is loaded with \babelprovide, selectors now set the font encoding based on the list provided when loading fontenc. This mechanism has been devised primarily for words or short texts in other languages loaded on the fly (although with RTL scripts you still need bidi=default), and it’s, in some sense, the equivalent in this engine of the automatic setting of language and script in xetex and luatex.

Not all scripts have an associated encoding, so this feature works only with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Armenian, and Georgian, provided a suitable font is found.

The rules for the assigned encoding are the following:

• If the valid encodings as set in the ini file contain the main font encoding, use this one.
• Otherwise, select the first encoding set in the ini file and declared with fontenc.

You can customize its behaviour in several ways:

• Disable it altogether with \babeladjust{ select.encoding = off }.
• Modify the encoding list in the ini file with identification/encodings = in \babelprovide with a space separated list, by order of preference (of course, this is not possible with locales loaded on the fly).

A simple example is the following:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[T2A, LGR, T5, T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\begin{document}

English \foreignlanguage{greek}{Ελληνικά} English.

\selectlanguage{bulgarian}

Български \foreignlanguage{vietnamese}{Tiếng Việt} български.

\end{document}

New option layout=counters*

The option layout=counters redefines some counters for they to be printed in the correct order in RTL text. Sadly, the added macros are written to the idx files, which break makeindex. The value counters* (with a star) attempts to remove the conflicting macros in the following way:

• pdftex and xetex pre-expand \thepage just before it’s written by the output routine, so that the expanded string doesn’t include them. This means the modified \thepage is written to the aux file, too.
• luatex processes the string to be written with a callback, only when \indexentry is present.

Fixes

• With select.write = omit the main language wasn’t selected in the aux file.
• Incorrect link box in end of line if it is preceded by a non-Arabic character (#207). Note that, very often, directions in labels and the like must be overriden, because the bidi algorithm knows nothing about the ‘semantics’ of text. This can be done with \mbox and \babelsublr.