What’s new in babel 3.91

2023-07-09

Transform for Hebrew transliteration

Hebrew and Yiddish define a transliteration based on the system devised by Christian Justen for cjhebrew (transliteration.cj). As with some other transliterations, it has been chosen because it’s TeX-friendy, ASCII and consistent. It departs, however, in a couple of points, which don’t belong to the transliteration proper:

• Final letters are not handled, and therefore they must be entered explicitly. This conversion should be a general tool, as a separate transform (forthcoming).
• The furtive patah is not shifted. That should be done by the font (as, in fact, cjhebrew does).

Fixes

• alignat and alignat* were missing in the list of amsmath environments patched for RTL mode. Now they should work (#208).
• The package option layout=extras was severely broken (#246).
• English and Arabic document broke when using paracol (#241).

Experimental: transforming strings

The experimental (an unfinished) macro \localeprehyphenationapplies the prehyphenation transforms for the current locale to a string (characters and spaces) and processes it in a fully expandable way (among other limitations, the string can’t contain ]==]).

Feedback is most welcome. Just open an issue.

The way it operates is admittedly rather cumbersome: it converts the string to a node list, processes it, and converts it back to a string.

It takes an argument with the string to be converted. So, assuming the omega transliteration for Greek is active, the following command stores the string ‘γεια σας’ in \mymacro :

\edef\mymacro{\localeprehyphenation{geia sac}}

Being experimental, it may change or even vanish.