Hi,

	I am releived to finally be able to tell you that I have
	finalized Babel release 3.7.

	What's new in release 3.7?
	Actually babel 3.7 is very much like the later releases of
	babel 3.6 (from 3.6k onwards). The concept of language
	attributes is new in this release. And support for a number of
	languages has been added. Here is a list of the changes since
	babel 3.6j:
	- Shorthands are expandable again. The disadvantage is that
	  one has to type '{}a when the acute accent is used as a
	  shorthand character. The advantage is that a number of other
	  problems (such as the breaking of ligatures, etc.) have
	  vanished.
	- Two new commands, \shorthandon and \shorthandoff have
	  been introduced to enable to temporarliy witch off one or more
	  shorthands.
	- Support for typesetting Sanskrit in transliteration will
	  be made available in a later release of babel 3.7.
	- Support for typesetting Kannada, Devnagari and Tamil will
	  be made available in a later release of babel 3.7.
	- Support for typesetting Greek has been enhaced. Code from
	  the kdgreek package (suggested by the author) was added
	  and \greeknumeral has been added.
	- A language attribute has been added to the \mark...
	  commands in order to make sure that a greek header line comes
	  out right on the last page before a language switch.
	- Support for typesetting Basque is now available thanks to
	  Juan Aguirregabiria.
	- Support for typesetting Serbian with latin script is now
	  available thanks to Dejan Muhamedagi'c and Jankovic
	  Slobodan.
	- Support for typesetting Hebrew (and potential support for
	  typesetting other rigth-to-left written languages) is now
	  available thanks to Rama Porrat and Boris Lavva.
	- Hyphenation pattern files are now read inside a
	  group; therefore any changes a pattern file needs to make to
	  lowercase codes, uppercase codes and category codes are kept
	  local to that group. If they are needed for the language, these
	  changes will need to repeated and stored in \extras...
	- Support for typesetting Latin is now available, thanks to
	  Krzysztof Konrad .Zelechowski.
	- The concept of language attributes is introduced. It is
	  intended to be used for giving the user some control over the
	  use of the features a language definition file provides. It's
	  first uses are for the Greek language, where the user can select
	  to use the \pi o\lambda\upsilon\tau o\nu\kappa\acute{o}
	  (``Polutoniko'' or multiaccented) Greek way of typesetting
	  texts, and for the Latin language where both modern and
	  medieval Latin are supported. 
	  These attributes wil possibly find wider use in future
	  releases.

	The last remark: where can you get babel 3.7?
	It is available in the directory
	/tex-archive/macros/latex/packags/babel on CTAN.

	Happy LaTeXing!

	Johannes Braams

TeXniek,                                Kersengaarde 33,
2723 BP Zoetermeer                      The Netherlands.
Phone    : +31 79 352 28 19             E-mail : JLBraams@cistron.nl
Fax      : +31 70 343 41 85
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