Document Classes ⇒ Babel package specific questions

[cdavid]

Dear all,

My name is Catalin David and I am a student at Jacobs University Bremen. During this summer, I will be working with one of the Computer Science professors here (Prof. Michael Kohlhase) and a few fellow undergraduate students, alongside with Mr. Bruce Miller (NIST) on a project called arXMLiv.

The purpose of the project is to be able to translate the scientific papers in the arXiv repositories (http://arxiv.org/) to XML. Here, you can find the official webpage of the project (http://kwarc.info/projects/arXMLiv/ ) and the page with the current status of the project (http://arxmliv.kwarc.info ).

The current package we are working on is Babel.sty and, therefore, I have some questions with regard to that. The language I am working on right now is Latin.

After reading the documentation, I tried to test to see what different macros are doing and how to use them. First of all, my current install of babel seems to not be according to the one on CTAN, so I've downloaded it and took a look at it.

Checking out the latin.sty file, I can see that, unlike the other languages we have implemented so far that are included in the Babel package, the latin.ldf file is not loaded at the end of the sty file. This does not concern us directly since we are also binding .ldf files, but, rather we would like to know whether the new direction on the future versions of Babel is to use directly .ldf files and not use .sty files at all. This would be interesting for us so that we know how we
should name our bindings and require our bindings (right now, they are .sty.ltxml, but we would like to know whether we should have .ldf.ltxml files instead). So, the main question, would be if the .sty files will be obsoleted in the future

One more thing I do not understand is how do I access one attribute of the latin language -- as they are defined here:

Code: Select all

\bbl@declare@ttribute{latin}{medieval}{%
 \addto\captionslatin{\def\prefacename{Pr{\ae}fatio}}%
 \def\november{Nouembris}%
 \expandafter\addto\expandafter\extraslatin
 \expandafter{\extrasmedievallatin}%
 }
\bbl@declare@ttribute{latin}{withprosodicmarks}{%
 \expandafter\addto\expandafter\extraslatin
 \expandafter{\extraswithprosodicmarks}%
 }

and how do I switch from one attribute of the language to another. I know that \extras_ take care of implementing some of the specific things of each attribute of the language, but there is no constructor to switch (i know \selectlanguage{} in german.sty does just that since german.sty also includes french and english, besides german) between the attributes (are \LatinMarksOn and \ProsodicMarksOn doing just this?).

Thank you very much for your help,
Catalin David on behalf of the arXMLiv team