With Babel, LaTeX ≥, and a monolingual document in UTF-8 encoding (which is the recommended encoding), all you need in many European languages is something like, for example:Įncodings Unicode engines Babel with LuaTeX can do it automatically by means of “transforms” with XeTeX this can be done to some extent (both Babel and Polyglossia), while in 8-bit engines many of them must be done by hand. Typographical rules and transliterations Performing miscellaneous transformation both at the character level (like transliterations) as at the typographical one (like inserting spaces or penalties at appropriate places). With XeTeX, both Babel and Polyglossia rely on the bidi package, which requires explicit markup to change the direction. Layout elements such as tables, margins and so on must be reversed, too, and it's done by Babel with luatex to a great extent. Babel + LuaTeX uses and algorithm based on te Unicode one, which changes the direction automatically. Bidirectional typesetting Supporting documents that contain right to left scripts. Polyglossia can generate the current date in the Hebrew, Islamic (Civil) and Persian calendars Babel supports in addition Islamic Umm al-Qura, Coptic and Buddhist. Cultural elements Translating document labels (like “chapter”, “figure”, “bibliography”), as well as formatting dates according to language-specific conventions and formatting numbers for languages that have their own numbering system. There is also some tentative support for Arabic justificacion.

Babel provides basic line breaking for CJK scripts, as well as non-standard hyphenation, like “ff” → “ff-f”, repeated hyphens, and ranked rules. In the case of hyphenated languages, loading the language-specific hyphenation patterns. Linebreaking, justification and hyphenation Activating for each script and language the corresponding line breaking algorithm. See also the discussion of fontspec in the Fonts chapter. With Babel + LuaTeX the font can be switched automatically based on script. It supports about 80 languages.īoth packages cover the major languages around the World (French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Hindi, Marathi, etc.) and handle the following tasks:įonts Setting the script and language tags of the current font, if possible, and switching between fonts for each language, as specified by the user (mainly XeTeX and LuaTeX).

Polyglossia was devised as an alternative to Babel for XeTeX (although currently also provides support for LuaTeX, but not for pdfTeX).It also provides partial support for Plain TeX. Depending on the engine the number of supported languages goes from about 70 to 250, and new ones can be declared easily from scratch.

Babel works with the three main engines, namely, pdfTeX, LuaTeX and XeTeX.There are currently two packages providing international language support, namely, Babel and Polyglossia: LaTeX requires some additional configuration to typeset documents in languages other than English. Collaborative Writing of LaTeX Documents.Scientific Reports (Bachelor Report, Master Thesis, Dissertation).

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