What’s new in babel 3.86

2023-02-13

tabular

In bidi texts there are two modes for tabular, namely, the default one, which orders columns from left to right, and layout=tabular, with all-RTL tables. When these two modes were introduced I was completely convinced the default mode would be a lot more simple than the all-RTL one. It turned out it was quite the opposite, for the reasons explained in Sorting out tabular with luatex.

In this version, there is a new solution based on patching the internals of the LaTeX tabular, as well as the packages array and colortbl.

\localerestoredirs (lua)

This command resets the internal text, paragraph and body directions to those of the current locale (if different). Sometimes changing directly these values can be useful for some hacks, and this command helps in restoring the directions to the correct ones. It can be used in ‘>’ arguments of array, too.

\babeladjust

There is a new key in case you want to deal directly with directions in math: bidi.math, with values on and off. Currently it can be used in the preamble only and affects the whole document.

Also, layout.tabular can be used to (mostly) disable the changes in the tabular default mode. It can be used only in the preamble. There are no changes in the layout=tabular mode, which behaves as before.

Changes in ini files

• Use more common term for glossary in lithuanian (thanks to Andrius Pukšta, @yjhn).
• Added diacritics to the rules for kashida.plain in persian.