What’s new in babel 3.88
2023-04-18
New locale files
There are 37 new locale files, based on the just released CLDR 43. They are, grouped by script:
- Arabic. Baluchi.
- Cyrillic. Abkhazian, Erzya.
- Devanagari. Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani.
- Ethiopic. Blin, Geez, Tigre, Wolaytta.
- Latin. Afar, Atsam, Corsican, Ga, Guarani, Jju, Ligurian, Muscogee, Northern Sotho, Nyanja, Papiamento, Prussian, Saho, Sicilian, Silesian, South Ndebele, Southern Sotho, Swati, Taroko, Tok Pisin, Tsonga, Tswana, Tyap, Venda, Volapük.
- N’ko. N’Ko.
- Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Inuktitut.
In addition, some month names in Greek has been fixed (thanks to Günter Milde).
New hook
With a new hook, code can be injected before the declarations by a
language within \AtBeginDocument. The optional argument with the
language in this particular case is not the ‘current’ one, because at
this point is always the main language, but the language that wrote the
code. There is also a special value in this argument, because / means
‘return to the core babel definitions’ (in other words, what follows
hasn’t been written by any language).
Preview: casing
This features relies in a future change in the LaTeX kernel, so it’s not currently available and, of course, experimental. It’s related to the new casing mechanism.
There is a new option in \babelprovide to set the default casing
rules in a few languages. They are (from interface3.pdf):
- Armenian:
yiwn, which maps U+0587 to capital ech and yiwn on uppercasing. - German:
eszett, which maps the lowercase Eszett to a großes Eszett (in other words, ‘SS’ is a single character). - Greek:
iota, which converts the ypogegrammeni (subscript muted iota) to capital iota when uppercasing.
For example:
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\babelprovide[casing=iota]{greek}