[issue:319] Re: italian.ldf error on platex

[Claudio Beccari]

Dear Yamashita,
thank you so much for spotting this error. I am really grateful.
In spite of having a Japanese daughter-in-law, I do not know Japanese, 
except a few words, and therefore I never tested my babel-italian.ldf 
with platex and uplatex.

Actually the apostrophe works fine with pdflatex, thanks to the LICR 
(LaTeX Internal Character Representation) that is being used when the 
source code is UTF-9 encoded, and the output PDF file is T1 encoded.

With the patch you suggest I will check that it works as expected and 
upload the new version to CTAN as soon as possible.

I acknowledge  your special attention.

All the best
Claudio


On 15/11/2019 17:30, Hironobu Yamashita wrote:
> Hi Claudio,
>
> Thanks for maintaining the package babel-italian.
> But I noticed that \usepackage[italian]{babel} cannot
> be used on platex and uplatex after TeX Live 2018:
>
> MWE:
>      \documentclass{article}
>      \usepackage[italian]{babel}
>      \begin{document}
>      a
>      \end{document}
>
> Error:
>      ! Bad character code (8217).
>      <to be read again>
>                         =
>      l.3 \begin{document}
>
>      ?
>
> The problem lies in \lccode"2019, as
>    * pTeX and upTeX are not Unicode-compliant, so \lccode allows
>      only 0--255.
>    * pdfTeX is not Unicode-compilant either, so \lccode should never
>      work for 256 or larger code (silently ignored without error?)
>
> Therefore, I propose the patch attached;
> here I used \Umathcode for detecting truely
> Unicode-compilant engines (= LuaTeX and XeTeX).
>
> Best regards,
> Hironobu
>
>
> ---
> Hironobu YAMASHITA
> GitHub: https://github.com/aminophen
> Japanese TeX Development Community https://texjp.org/