[tex-live] serious `slovak' Babel bug

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:50:51 +0100 (CET) schrieb Werner LEMBERG:

> Folks,
> 
> 
> is it useful today to report Babel bugs to the LaTeX bug database?  Does
> anybody take care of answering them or even fixing issues?
> 
> Here's a quite serious bug:
> 
>   \documentclass{article}
> 
>   \usepackage[slovak,USenglish]{babel}
> 
>   \begin{document}
> 
>   ^^78
> 
>   \end{document}
> 
>   ===>
> 
>     ! Missing $ inserted.
>     <inserted text>
>                     $
>     l.7 ^
>          ^78
>     ?
> 
> It might be acceptable that the ^^xx notation fails within a Slovakian
> language environment since the circumflex has been made a shorthand,
> but this is not the case here.

This is a general babel behaviour: the catcodes of the various
shorthands are not reset at language switches. I reported this in
comp.text.tex some month ago
(http://groups.google.de/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/86d6d296ae28016e?fwc=1)

In some cases it is enough to use \shorthandoff. In other (like
yours) you must explicitly reset the catcode 

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[czech,%make - active
            slovak,USenglish]{babel}
\begin{document}
%\catcode`\-=12
\shorthandoff{-}
\begin{tabular}{ll}
a & b\\\cline{1-2}
\end{tabular}

\catcode`\^=7
%\shorthandoff{^} 
^^74

\end{document}

>  Especially in the light of the recent discussion of using
> the ^^xx notation instead of `real' 8bit character codes it's quite
> important IMHO to fix this problem.

Well I doubt a bit that many users use ^^xx in the document, and ^
in math works still fine. 

-- 
Ulrike Fischer