TeXipedia

babel

Provides comprehensive multilingual support and language-specific typographical rules for documents written in various TeX engines.

Overview

Enables seamless creation of multilingual documents by managing language-specific typography, hyphenation patterns, and cultural conventions. The package serves as a foundation for international document preparation.

  • Supports over 300 languages worldwide, including non-Latin scripts and right-to-left writing systems.
  • Allows dynamic switching between languages within the same document.
  • Handles language-specific quotation marks, date formats, and other cultural conventions automatically.
  • Compatible with multiple TeX engines including pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, and LuaLaTeX.
  • Essential for academic publications, international documentation, and multilingual books.
  • Integrates with other packages to provide comprehensive internationalization support.

Getting Started

To use babel, include it in your document preamble with at least one language option:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

For multiple languages (with the first being the default):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[french,spanish,english]{babel}

Babel works with pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, and LuaLaTeX. For languages with non-Latin scripts, XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX may be required.

Examples

Basic multilingual document with English and Spanish sections.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english,spanish]{babel}
\begin{document}
\selectlanguage{english}
This text is in English.

\selectlanguage{spanish}
Este texto está en español.
\end{document}

Document with language-specific hyphenation and date formatting.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[french,german,english]{babel}
\begin{document}
\selectlanguage{english}
Today is \today. Long words like internationalization are hyphenated.

\selectlanguage{french}
Aujourd'hui c'est \today. Les mots longs comme internationalisation sont correctement coupés.

\selectlanguage{german}
Heute ist \today. Lange Wörter wie Internationalisation werden richtig getrennt.
\end{document}