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Babel

The multilingual framework to localize LaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX

What’s new in babel 3.94

2023-09-12

Chinese dates

Now with the Chinese locales dates with the tradicional calendar can be printed. By default the year is numeric, but there is a variant with the sexagenary cycle (the latter is available only if the locale is loaded with provide or \babelprovide).

The following two commands print the current date in the Chinese calendar (numeric and sexagenary). See the babel manual for further info:

\localedate[calendar=chinese, convert]{\year}{\month}{\day}
\localedate[calendar=chinese, variant=sexagenary, convert]{\year}{\month}{\day}

By default, \today prints the gregorian date, but this can be changed with the option calendar. Remember setting it always implies the date is converted:

\babelprovide[import, calendar=chinese]{babel}
\babelprovide[import, calendar=chinese.sexagenary]{babel}

With the first one, \today will print something like 二〇二三年七月二十, and the second one like 癸卯年七月二十.

Note the string can be slightly diferent depending on the locale.

New locale files

There are a few new ‘bare minimum locales’ (see What’s new in babel 3.93):

Hebrew

Thanks to Udi Fogiel, babel-hebrew (the original style for 8-bit engines) is again maintained, and it’s useable directly in TeXlive. The ini files in the babel core have been adjusted to reflect correctly the font encondings for pdflatex.

New transform for kashida

Christian Lück has contributed a new transform, similar to kashida.plain, but with diacritics stacked to the actual base character and not the kashida extension. Its name is kashida.base, and with evenly inserted tatweels results are better (even much better) than with kashida.plain.

It’s still a set of rules for ‘plain’ Arabic font, with no ligatures. Some fonts may require aditional transforma to avoid the kashida at specific places. See

Fixes