The new Babel beta release (3.7g, dated 9 February 2001)

In Babel version 3.7 a number of bugs that were found in version 3.6 are fixed. Also a number of changes and additions have occured:

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 Greek has been enhaced. Code from the kdgreek package (suggested by the author) was added and \greeknumeral has been added.

Support for typesetting Basque is now available thanks to Juan Aguirregabiria.

Support for typesetting Serbian with latin script is now available thanks to Dejan Muhamedagic 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.

Support for typesetting Bulgarian is nowavailable thanks to Georgi Boshnakov.

Support for typesetting Latin is now available, thanks to Claudio Beccari and Krzysztof Konrad Zelechowski.

Support for typesetting North Sami is now available, thanks to Regnor Jernsletten.

The options canadian, candien and acadien have been added for Canadian English and French use.

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.

Hyphenation pattern files are now read inside a group; therefor 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 be repeated and stored in \extras...

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 use is 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. These attributes wil possibly find wider use in future releases.

The environment hyphenrules is introduced.

The command \providehyphenmins should now be used in language definition files in order to be able to keep any settings provided by the pattern file.