This package manages culturally-determined typographical (and other) rules, and hyphenation patterns for a wide range of languages. Many language styles work with pdflatex, as well as with xelatex and lualatex out of the box. A few even work with plain formats.
The latest stable version is available on https://ctan.org/pkg/babel.
Version 3.9a fixed lots of bugs and added some new features, intended mainly to make it compatible somehow with Unicode engines. Some bugs have not been fixed to avoid backward incompatibilities, but they have been documented. Most of the new features (like package options) were intended to overcome issues in previous releases without changing significantly the behaviour of Babel.
Current development is focused on Unicode engines (XeTeX and LuaTeX). New features related to font selection, bidi writing and the like will be added incrementally. Versions numbers drop the letter and now 3.10, 3.11, etc., will be used instead. So, 3.9t is the last in the former series.
Included is a set of ini files for about 200 languages.
Languages are not part of the Babel core any more; in particular, it shall be no longer necessary to synchronize Babel core releases with releases of Babel language files. See CONTRIB for further details about contributing a language. You may also create an ini file or improve the existing ones -- it's a trivial task (no programming skills required at all), but don't hesitate to ask for help.
The best way to install and/or update it is with the help of package managers.
Changes are described in babel.pdf with the label "New ". The manual has been expanded to include some tips and tricks, but it will be improved in next releases.
If you wish to report a problem or bug in any of these packages please
use the
Issue Tracker for LaTeX2e on GitHub
and follow the guidelines that pop up if you press the New issue
button.
In particular, to check that you are really seeing a bug, please write
a short, self-contained document that shows the problem. This should
include the latexbug package, which will warn if your test file is
not suitable for one or the other reason. See the
CONTRIBUTING guide
for further details, or if you need to obtain the latexbug package.
If the bug turns out to be with third-party software then please contact the developer, and not us!
You may also report them to the author more informally on:
http://www.texnia.com/contact.html
Bugs related to specific languages are best reported to their respective authors.
3.xx - Fix - Error with \chapter if empty in ini
- Prelimimary support for Sanskrit
- Unknown languages in aux files do not raise an error
any more (only show a warning).
3.21 - Fix - equation numbers raised an error.
- Two minor changes: if no language is requested load nil
instead of raising an error, and the message 'babel <x.x>...'
is not printed to the log any more.
3.20 - ini files with the field digits.native define
\<language>digits and \<language>counters. \arabic can be
redefined to use native digits.
- Fix - mapfont in bidi=basic didn't take into account combining
marks (eg, Arabic vowels).
- Fix - A bug introduced in 3.19, which sometimes reversed text
in \hbox'es.
- Fix for luatex 1.07 - An internal change in luatex broke
bidi at 'automatic' hyphens.
- Fix for latest latex - babel.ins raised an error.
3.19 - Most changes are for luatex:
. The main new feature is a bidi method for both implicit L in
R text, and implicit R in L text, with the possibility of
switching the font automatically. Still somewhat
experimental, but it should work in most cases.
. layout=extras for a couple of miscellaneous readjustments.
. bidi equation numbers.
- Also, for all engines, new field in some ini files:
digits.native (to be used in future releases).
3.18 - More bidi in luatex: captions (required only in multilingual
docs) and tabular (required for R tables). Also an experimental
support for captions in xetex and pdftex (tabular is not yet
supported).
- New ini files: ar-DZ, ar-MA, ar-SY
- Fix - \begin{hyphenrules} didn't work with polyglossia.
- Fix - switch.def was loaded twice.
3.17 - A tool for bidi footnotes.
- Fix - \ragged... didn't work for bidi.
3.16 - New package option layout for bidi documents.
- Quotes in TU encoding
- Fix - \<language>date did not work correctly
- Fix - with some languages (eg, british), using
\babelfont raised an error.
3.15 - New command \babelfont (in Unicode engines) to define
language/script dependent fonts. Related to it, new
keys (script, language) in \babelprovide.
- A common mistake is to leave some space(s) in \captions<lang>,
which go to the document. Now babel removes them.
- Fix - Error with hyphenrules in \babelprovide in some cases.
- Fix - \hyphenrules doesn't set \languagename any more (which
was against the documented behavior),
3.14 - R text (Hebrew-like) and AL text (Arabic-like) in luatex, with
"European" and "Arabic" numbers, mirroring and unmarked L text.
- Fix - `import' ignored `hyphenrules' in ini files.
3.13 - Existing ldf files takes priority over declared options with
\DeclareOption (except hebrew).
- With a few exceptions, ini files have reached version 1.0.
- New key `import' for \babelprovide, which also defines dates.
[3.12 - Internal.]
3.11 - Fix - error when version in format and of package
didn't match.
- Now switch.def is loaded always.
- First steps in bidi writing.
3.10 - New versioning
- New macro - \babelprovide
3.9t - Part of the code for 3.10 ss has been "back-ported" to this
release, but they are only internal changes.
- Fix - with \babelhyphen{soft} the hyphen could vanish.
- English, Indonesian and Malay "dialects" now rely on the proxy
files provided by these languages (eg, american.ldf, melayu.ldf).
If you upgrade babel, you MUST upgrade those languages, too.
Javier Bezos 2018/05/23