Hi,
I am releived to finally be able to tell you that I have
finalized 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 \emph{preambleonly} command |\substitutefontfamily| has
been added to create \file{.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.
The last remark: where can you get babel 3.6?
It is available in the directory
/tex-archive/macros/latex/packags/babel on CTAN.
For those who want to test the new support for Russian: you'll
need the LH fonts (see CyrillcFonts.txt in the distribution)
Happy LaTeXing!
Johannes Braams
TeXniek, Kooienswater 62,
2715 AJ Zoetermeer The Netherlands.
Phone : +31 79 352 28 19 E-mail : JLBraams@cistron.nl
Fax : +31 70 343 23 95
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------