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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.
Next: A description of the
Up: Babel
Previous: The new Babel beta
2001-02-11