The latest Babel release (version 3.6Z, dated 9 september 1999)

In early 1999 I have had to make some changes to babel wich were related to the appearance of the cyrillic bundle. At the same time I copied quite a lot of the bug fixes that were waiting in babel release 3.7 to release 3.6. This work finally yeilded babel release 3.6Z.

At the original release of babel 3.6 I wrote:

I have finally finished Babel release 3.6.

What's new in release 3.6?

In Babel version 3.6 a number of bugs that were found in version 3.5 are fixed. Also a number of changes and additions have occured:

A new environment otherlanguage*' is introduced. it only switches the `specials', but leaves the `captions' untouched.

The shorthands are no longer fully expandable. Some problems could only be solved by peeking at the token following an active character. The advantage is that 'a works as expected for languages that have the ' active.

Support for typesetting french texts is much enhanced; the file francais.ldf is now replaced by frenchb.ldf which is maintained by Daniel Flipo.

Support for typesetting the russian language is again available. The languange definition file was originally developped by Olga Lapko from cyrtug. The fonts needed to typeset the russian language are now part of the babel distribution. The support is not yet up to the level which is needed according to Olga, but this is a start.

Support for typesetting greek texts is now also available. What is offered in this release is a first attempt; it will be enhanced later on by Yannis Haralambous.

Support for typesetting Welsh texts has been added.

A new command \aliasshorthand is introduced. It seems that in Poland various conventions are used to type the necessary polish letters. It is now possible to use the character / as a shorthand character instead of the character " by issuing the command \aliasshorthand{"}{/}.

The shorthand mechanism now deals correctly with characters that are already active.

Shorthand characters are made active at \begin{document}, not earlier. This is to prevent problems with other packages.

A preambleonly command \substitutefontfamily has been added to create .fd files on the fly when the font families of the latin text differ from the families used for the cyrillic or greek parts of the text.