alt Hacker NewsI recently had a document break because I used umlauts together with the subfigs package. Apparently both use " characters internally and clash badly. This is not a particularly exotic use case.
I recently had a document break because I used umlauts together with the subfigs package. Apparently both use " characters internally and clash badly. This is not a particularly exotic use case.
Yeah, unfortunately lots of the third-party LaTeX packages are fairly poorly written. Which also applies to most other programming languages, but LaTeX is somewhat unique here since (1) approximately nobody makes money off of TeX, so even "important" packages are often volunteer-maintained, and (2) LaTeX2e has been around since the early 90s, so some of the popular packages have been unmaintained for over 20 years.
The core/official LaTeX code is really quite stable, but it's also very limited, so it's pretty reasonable to conflate it with the LaTeX ecosystem as a whole. But yes, the LaTeX Team is definitely aware of the problems caused by Babel shorthands (which is what " is in German), and they're trying to figure out some way to fix it without breaking other documents.