What’s new in babel 3.96

2023-10-25

Version number is reaching 3.100, and a new numbering schema will be introduced in 2024, with the year (abbreviated) and a correlative number.

Improved onchar

Besides optimizing it for speed, a somewhat surprising behavior has been fixed. Let’s suppose you have decided to write some untagged Serbian text in an English document, so you write:

\babelprovide[onchar = ids fonts]{serbian}

But this handles every Cyrillic letter, including those in something like:

\foreignlanguage{bulgarian}{български}

To avoid it, onchar is now applied only if the original and the target scripts are different.

Improved locales

• Odia (Oriya). Captions has been defined, a few months have been fixed and there are a couple of alphabetic counters, namely, alphabetic and akshar. Thanks to ଅଶୋକ ଦାସ୍ and ଅଭିଷେକ ଜେନା.

• Croatian. Transform hyphen.repeat.

A few encodings have been sorted out, to remove OT1.

ASCII encoding

As suggested by Udi Fogiel, with the macro \asciiencoding you can retrieve and modify the value determined by babel for \ensureascii.

Fixes

• Fixed the name for the counter date.day (from date.days) in zh locales.
• Added the LGI encoding to the non-ASCII list.