Language incubator for babel

Version 0.2. 2021-01-12.

Creating an ldf file for babel can be intimidating. This page provides a simple way to create a simple language definition file for the babel system. This is still very rudimentary, but even so you may find it a very convenient way to, at least, start the work.

Currently only the skeleton, the minimal structure, is generated. Anyway, it can be used directly, even if it is not fully adapted to the typographical conventions. Future work will provide more tools and very likely integration with CLDR in order the ease localizing TeX.

String are currently not converted to the LICR for traditional engines (you must still do it by hand — to be fixed).

Another nice improvement would be beautifying this page, of course.

Note also I haven’t said it’s bug free.

Identification

Author
Language
Version number
Version date (format must be YYYY/MM/DD)
Version string (eg, Mylanguage support for babel

Captions

Preface
References
Abstract
Bibliography
Chapter
Appendix
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Index
Figure
Table
Part
encl
cc
To
Page
see
see also
Proof
Glossary

Date

Currently, only the Gregorian calendar is supported.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

Enter string for date. Use #d# for day, #m# for month and #y#. Remember currently babel only supports dates in non-abbreviated format (month name, four-digit years). For example, as in Spanish “1 de septiembre de 2015” (which would be entered as “#d# de~#m# de~#y#).

Date format

Typography

French spacing

Shorthands

Leave empty if not required. Currently, the only shorthand supported is " (doble quote)

Soft hyphen Recommended: "-
Hard hyphen Recommended: "=
Break ligatures Recommended: "|

Create

Below is the generated code. Just copypaste them to the corresponding files (named language.dtx and language.ins). Make sure the encoding is utf8.