What’s new in babel 3.93

2023-08-29

Hebrew counters

The ini locales for Hebrew and Yiddish provide a numeral named letters, with the usual form in the modern varieties. However, there are some variants provided by babel-hebrew (the ldf language style), which were absent. Udi Fogiel (@Udi-Fogiel) has made them fully expandable and now they are also available if the locale is explicitly loaded with provide or \babelprovide (in other words, they aren’t available in these locales if loaded on the fly). The limit is 999999 (for forward compatibility, in case the list is expanded).

They are used with \localenumeral and \localecounter. See the babel manual for further information on these commands.

• letters.plain same as \hebrewnumeral, and same as letters, except values larger than 9999 are valid (but still up to 999999).

• letters.gershayim same as \Hebrewnumeral.

• letters.final same as \Hebrewnumeralfinal.

It can be customized with two macros:

• \BabelHebrewNumeralMarkerSingle, set by default to geresh.
• \BabelHebrewNumeralMarkerFinal, set by default to gershayim.

In case you need different settings for Hebrew and Yiddish, you can re(set) these values with the language (with \addto or \AddBabelHook).

Chinese calendar

\babelcalendar now can convert dates to the Chinese calendar (years 2015-2044). Intercalary months are numbered from 13 to 24, so that in the current year (2023) it’s 14 , because it comes after the second month (so, 12 + 2).

Strings in the corresponding locales are defined only in part — cyclic years, with the CLDR code U, and day names will be added in the next release.

New locale files

Many locale templates are quite useable, provided captions and dates are not required (which is a very frequent case, particularly in ancient languages). So, they will be included in the default babel distribution. This can serve to encourage contributions, too. A warning will remember they are ‘bare minumum locales’. The locales added in this release are:

• southernaltai
• divehi
• ancientegyptian
• egyptianarabic (aka Masri or Colloquial Egyptian, with tag arz, not to be confused with the Standard Arabic as spoken in Egypt, with tag ar-EG).
• phoenician (note it’s an RTL language)
• newari

Note some of these language are not targeted (at least currently) by the Unicode CLDR, which is focused on written modern languages. This is not true for LaTeX.

Fixes

• Table with arabic text corrupted when trying to colour cells (#252).
• Bold small caps were wrong in some cases (#92). This is not really a bug in babel, because not a long time ago it worked as expected and I was able to reproduce the issue without it. It’s rather an improvement in the way fonts are switched with languages (LaTeX assumes a single font and a single series tag per family).
• Missing numerals in sanskrit.