Xi'an's Og

This afternoon, I had to recompile a LαTεX file written two years ago (in French) and it returned the error:

[sourcecode language=”latex” gutter=”false”]
Missing \endcsname inserted.
<to be read again>
\unskip
l.182 \citeyear{berger:robert:1990}
avec James Berger dans un article aux {\…
[/sourcecode]

and I couldn’t figure out what had changed into the compiler to produce this strange message… Except that removing the line

[sourcecode language=”latex” gutter=”false”]
\usepackage[french]{babel}
[/sourcecode]

was removing the error message (but producing garbage French!).

I thus checked on forums and found some solution on a French LαTεX users forum called MathemaTeX. The issue had to do with using `:’ in my reference codes… However, after fiddling with this solution, I ended up with

[sourcecode language=”latex” gutter=”false”]
\usepackage[french,english]{babel}
[/sourcecode]

as enough to remove the error message and produce the same output as earlier. Weird! (As I always use the same bibTeX file and do use babel-french from time to time… Maybe not that often with citations, actually!)

This entry was posted on February 26, 2013 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Books, University life with tags babel-franch, BibTeX, LaTeX, natbib. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.