Babel, a multilingual package for use with LATEX's ... - linsrv.net

• Using a character mathematically active (ie, with math code "8000) as a
shorthand can make T E X enter in an infinite loop. (Another issue in the ‘to do’
list, although there is a partial solution.)
• Also in the ‘to do’ list is a user interface to set the way scripts are switched,
to avoid the current problem of languages trying to define \text〈script〉 in
different ways.
The following packages can be useful, too (the list is still far from complete):
csquotes Logical markup for quotes.
iflang Tests correctly the current language.
hyphsubst Selects a different set of patters for a language.
translator An open platform for packages that need to be localized.
siunitx Typesetting of numbers and physical quantities.
biblatex Programmable bibliographies and citations.
bicaption Bilingual captions.
babelbib Multilingual bibliographies.
microtype Adjusts the typesetting according to some languages (kerning and
spacing). Ligatures can be disabled.
substitutefont Combines fonts in several encodings.
1.12 Future work
Useful additions would be, for example, time, currency, addresses and personal
names. 13 . But that is the easy part, because they don’t require modifying the L A T E X
internals.
More interesting are differences in the sentence structure or related to it. For
example, in Basque the number precedes the name (including chapters), in
Hungarian “from (1)” is “(1)-ből”, but “from (3)” is “(3)-ból”, in Spanish an item
labelled “3. o ” may be referred to as either “ítem 3. o ” or “3. er ítem”, and so on.
Even more interesting is right-to-left, vertical and bidi typesetting. Babel provided
a basic support for bidi text as part of the style for Hebrew, but it is somewhat
unsatisfactory and internally replaces some hardwired commands by other
hardwired commands (generic changes would be much better).
Handling of “Unicode” fonts is also problematic. There is fontspec, but special
macros are required (not only the NFSS ones) and it doesn’t provide “orthogonal
axis” for features, including those related to the language (mainly language and
script). A couple of tentative macros, which solve the two main cases, are provided
by babelwith a partial solution (only xetex and luatex, for obvious reasons), but use
them at your own risk, as they might be removed in the future. For this very
reason, they are described here:
• \babelFSstore{〈babel-language〉} sets the current three basic families (rm,
sf, tt) as the default for the language given. In most cases, this macro will be
enough.
• \babelFSdefault{〈babel-language〉}{〈fontspec-features〉} patches
\fontspec so that the given features are always passed as the optional
argument or added to it (not an ideal solution). Use it only if you select some
fonts in the document with \fontspec.
So, for example:
13 See for example POSIX, ISO 14652 and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR).
17