Babel release 3.7

[Richard B Mahoney]

Dear Readers,

Harry Spier has just mentioned some useful programmes. While we
are on the subject it may be timely for me to do the same. 8-)

This was posted to comp.text.tex yesterday. For those of you
typesetting translit. Skt., Tamil, and Devanagari et ceatera the
proposed development of Babel may be of interest.

Many regards,

 Richard Mahoney


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CTAN:/tex-archive/macros/latex/packags/babel has now Babel release 3.7

>From the announcement file:

        What's new in release 3.7?
        Actually babel 3.7 is very much like the later releases of
        babel 3.6 (from 3.6k onwards). The concept of language
        attributes is new in this release. And support for a number of
        languages has been added. Here is a list of the changes since
        babel 3.6j:
        - Shorthands are expandable again. The disadvantage is that
          one has to type '{}a when the acute accent is used as a
          shorthand character. The advantage is that a number of other
          problems (such as the breaking of ligatures, etc.) have
          vanished.
        - Two new commands, \shorthandon and \shorthandoff have
          been introduced to enable to temporarliy witch off one or more
          shorthands.
        - Support for typesetting Sanskrit in transliteration will
          be made available in a later release of babel 3.7.
        - Support for typesetting Kannada, Devnagari and Tamil will
          be made available in a later release of babel 3.7.
        - Support for typesetting Greek has been enhaced. Code from
          the kdgreek package (suggested by the author) was added
          and \greeknumeral has been added.
        - A language attribute has been added to the \mark...
          commands in order to make sure that a greek header line comes
          out right on the last page before a language switch.
        - Support for typesetting Basque is now available thanks to
          Juan Aguirregabiria.
        - Support for typesetting Serbian with latin script is now
          available thanks to Dejan Muhamedagi'c and Jankovic
          Slobodan.
        - Support for typesetting Hebrew (and potential support for
          typesetting other rigth-to-left written languages) is now
          available thanks to Rama Porrat and Boris Lavva.
        - Hyphenation pattern files are now read inside a
          group; therefore any changes a pattern file needs to make to
          lowercase codes, uppercase codes and category codes are kept
          local to that group. If they are needed for the language, these
          changes will need to repeated and stored in \extras...
        - Support for typesetting Latin is now available, thanks to
          Krzysztof Konrad .Zelechowski.
        - The concept of language attributes is introduced. It is
          intended to be used for giving the user some control over the
          use of the features a language definition file provides. It's
          first uses are for the Greek language, where the user can select
          to use the \pi o\lambda\upsilon\tau o\nu\kappa\acute{o}
          (``Polutoniko'' or multiaccented) Greek way of typesetting
          texts, and for the Latin language where both modern and
          medieval Latin are supported.
          These attributes wil possibly find wider use in future
          releases.


Reinhard Zierke
for the CTAN team

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------------------------ Richard Mahoney -------------------------
78 Jeffreys Rd                                      +64-3-351-5831
Christchurch                                           New Zealand
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