[latex3-commits] [latex2e-public] r1413 - first cut at ltnews27: feel free to edit extensively, just getting something down

[noreply at latex-project.org]

Author: carlisle
Date: 2017-03-11 22:57:11 +0100 (Sat, 11 Mar 2017)
New Revision: 1413

Modified:
   trunk/doc/ltnews27.tex
Log:
first cut at ltnews27: feel free to edit extensively, just getting something down

Modified: trunk/doc/ltnews27.tex
===================================================================
--- trunk/doc/ltnews27.tex	2017-03-11 14:34:39 UTC (rev 1412)
+++ trunk/doc/ltnews27.tex	2017-03-11 21:57:11 UTC (rev 1413)
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@
 
 \usepackage{lmodern,url,hologo}
 
-\publicationmonth{April}
+\publicationmonth{May}
 \publicationyear{2017}
 
 \publicationissue{27}
@@ -46,7 +46,70 @@
 \tableofcontents
 
 \setlength\rightskip{0pt plus 3em}
-\section{something}
 
+\section{ISO 8601 Date Format}
+Since before the first releases of \LaTeX2e, \LaTeX\ has used a date
+format in the form \textsc{yyyy/mm/dd}. This has many advantages over more
+conventional formats, as it is easy to sort and avoids the unfortunate
+ambiguity between different comunities as to whether 2017/01/02 is the
+1st of February or 2nd of January.
 
+However there is another date format, formalised by the
+International standard, ISO~8601. The basic format defined by this
+standard is functionally equivalent to the \LaTeX\ format, but using
+\texttt{-} rather than \texttt{-}. This date format is now supported
+in many Operating Systems and applications
+(for example the \verb|date --iso-8601| command in linux and similar systems).
+
+From this release, \LaTeX\ will accept ISO format date strings in the
+date argument of \verb|\ProvidesPackage|, \verb|\usepackage| etc.
+Currently we recommend that you do not use this format in any packages
+that need to work with older \LaTeX\ releases. 
+The \textsf{latexrelease} package may be used with older releases to
+ add this functionality. This change is handled in a special way  by
+ \textsf{latexrelease}: The package always adds support for ISO dates
+whatever format date is requested, this is required so that the
+necessary date comparisons may be made.
+
+The new functionality can be seen in the startup banner which
+advertsises \texttt{LaTeX2e 2017-05-01}.
+
+\section{Further TU encoding improvements}
+The 2017/01/01 release saw the introduction of the new TU encoding for
+specifying Unicode fonts with \hologo{LuaTeX} and
+\hologo{XeTeX}. There were a number of small corrections and additions
+in the patch releases updating 2017/01/01, and a further addition in
+this release, notably extended support for the dot-under accent,
+\verb|\d|.
+
+
+\section{Disabling Hyphenation}
+The existing \LaTeX\ code for \verb|\verb| and \verb|verbatim| had some
+issues when used with fonts that were not loaded with hyphenation
+disabled via setting \verb|\hyphenchar| to $-1$. In this release these
+verbatim environments use a \verb|\language| setting,
+\verb|\l at nohyphenation|, that has no hyphenation patterns associated. 
+
+The format ensures that  a language has been allocated with this name.
+For most users this will in fact be no change as the standard
+\textsf{babel} language has for a long time allocated a language with
+this name.
+
+In order that page breaks in \texttt{verbatim} do not influence the
+language used in the page head and foot, the format now normalises the
+language used in the output routine to a default language as described
+below.
+ 
+
+\section{Default Document Language}
+
+A new integer parameter \verb|\document at default@language| is
+introduced, this is initialised to $-1$ but is set at
+\verb|\begin{document}| to the language in force at that time if it
+  has not been set by preamble code. This is versy similar to the
+  handling of the default color.  and is used in a similar way to
+  normalise the settings for page head and foot as described above.
+users should not normally need to set this explicitly but it expected that
+language packages such as \textsf{babel} may set this if the default
+behaviour is not suitable.
 \end{document}