[tex-live] tex-live Digest, Vol 101, Issue 13

[Daniel Flipo]

Gaspard Jankowiak <gasp.janko at gmail.com> wrote:

> Whenever I use the 'commath' and the 'babel' (with [french] option)
> packages, pdflatex seems to enter an infinite loop whenever a colon ':'
> appears in math mode.

Robin answered your question already, I'd just like to add two things:

1) Yes, the problem doesn't occur when using xetex and a recent version 
of frenchb (namely frenchb v. >= 2.5) as the four characters ':;!?' are 
no longer made active when xetex is in use (the same result is achieved
using the \XeTeXinterchartoks mechanism).

2) I'd suggest to contact the author of commath.sty to fix this issue.
It looks to me that he makes ':' active and redefines this character for 
a better alignment of := in mathmode.  Fine, but in fact the 
redefinition holds also for text mode which IMHO is wrong. frenchb 
redefines ':' and the other three *only* in 'horizontal mode' when the 
French Language is in use, so avoiding this conflict should be feasible.

-- 
Daniel Flipo