Babel release 3.7
Richard B Mahoney
rbm49 at STUDENT.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ
Wed Feb 28 00:15:18 UTC 2001
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
***************************************************************
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
***************************************************************
--
------------------------ Richard Mahoney -------------------------
78 Jeffreys Rd +64-3-351-5831
Christchurch New Zealand
--------------- mailto:rbm49 at csc.canterbury.ac.nz ----------------
More information about the INDOLOGY
mailing list