[Xy-pic] XY and babel: an example

[Samy Abbes]

>> Like other people in this mailing list, I have observed
>> some incompatibility between XY-pic and babel in LaTex.
>>
>> Symptoms : the positions are not recognised by XY-pic when
>> the following babel options are used : french, frenchb, breton, turkish.
>>
>
> Sure.
> Babel changes the meaning of some characters;
> e.g. " ! ' ` ?
> different ones are changed for different languages.
>
> However, it provides a way to counter these changes.
> Various versions of Babel have used different macro-names
> for the switch to turn off these special features.
>
To solve this issue with the "french" or "frenchb" babel extension,
I found it very handy to use the following command that switches off the 
meaning
of active characters "!", "?", ";" and ":"

{\shortdhandoff{;:!?}%
    [some XY-pic code, that will not be disturbed any more]
}

I could'nt figure out exactly what is doing the \shorthandoff command.
Anyway, a simple
\catcode`\!=11
    ...etc...
doesn't work.

Samy


>> Below I reproduce an example file that shows the symptoms.
>> The dvi file is succesfully generated, but the positions are 
>> misinterprated. Using \xycatcodes doesn't help.
>>
>> This file is correctly intreprated with the following babel options :
>> Afrikaans, Bahasa, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
>> Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, German, Greek, Hugarian,
>> Irish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scottish,
>> Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Usorbian, Welsh.
>>
>> I have not been able to use the remaining babel options :
>> Slovakian, Slovenian, Norwegian and Lower Sorbian.
>>
>
> Just wrap the diagram with the default language:
>
> {\english
>    \xymatrix at M=0pt{
>    A\ar[dr]!L&&A\ar[dl]\\
>    &B\POS!R\ar[u]
>    }
> }
>
Unfortunately, this trick didn't work when loading also the french 
extension.