Hi, This is the announcement of babel release 3.8, What's new in release 3.8? Actually babel 3.8 is very much like the later releases of babel 3.7. Support for a number of languages has been added. Here is a list of the changes since babel 3.7h: - 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 temporarily switch off one or more shorthands. - The support for Hebrew has been updated by Tzafrir Cohen - Support for Slovak has been extended with shorthand definitions. - Support for typesetting Sanskrit in transliteration will be made available in a later release of babel. - Support for typesetting Kannada, Devnagari and Tamil will be made available in a later release of babel. - Support for typesetting interlingua is now available, thanks to Peter Kleiweg . The last remark: where can you get babel 3.8? It is available in the directory /tex-archive/macros/latex/rewuired/babel on CTAN. Happy LaTeXing! Johannes Braams TeXniek, Kersengaarde 33, 2723 BP Zoetermeer The Netherlands. Phone : +31 79 352 28 19 E-mail : johannes at braams.cistron.nl Fax : +31 70 343 41 85 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------