Problem with babel and TikZ if any of russian, ngerman, spanish or portuguese are used

Question

The tikzpicture in the MWE compiles without problems for greek, French, Italian and English but, if any of Russian, ngerman, Spanish or Portuguese is added to babel, ERROR ! Missing \endcsname inserted. <to be read again> \alpha l.32 pic ["$\alpha$", draw, fill=yellow] {angle = F--X--A} The control sequence marked <to be read again> should not appear between \csname and \endcsname is produced.

\documentclass{article}
% RN. 1 July 2019
%=======================
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{angles}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usetikzlibrary{quotes}
\usepackage[greek,french,italian,english]{babel}
%\usepackage[greek,russian,ngerman,french,spanish,italian,portuguese,english]{babel}
%-----------------------
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[angle radius=.75cm]
\node (A) at (-2,0) [red,left] {$A$};
\node (B) at ( 3,.5) [red,right] {$B$};
\node (C) at (-2,2) [blue,left] {$C$};
\node (D) at ( 3,2.5) [blue,right] {$D$};
\node (E) at (60:-5mm) [below] {$E$};
\node (F) at (60:3.5cm) [above] {$F$};
\coordinate (X) at (intersection cs:first line={(A)--(B)}, second line={(E)--(F)});
\coordinate (Y) at (intersection cs:first line={(C)--(D)}, second line={(E)--(F)});
\path
(A) edge [red, thick] (B)
(C) edge [blue, thick] (D)
(E) edge [thick] (F)
pic ["$\alpha$", draw, fill=yellow] {angle = F--X--A}
pic ["$\beta$", draw, fill=green!30] {angle = B--X--F}
pic ["$\gamma$", draw, fill=yellow] {angle = E--Y--D}
pic ["$\delta$", draw, fill=green!30] {angle = C--Y--E};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Probably a duplicate of https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/495091/the-babel-library-does-not-work-with-the-tikzset-command-inside-the-document-en. Try adding shorthands=off in the babel options, or putting \deactivatequoting at the start of your document. — Rmano, Jul 01 '19 at 09:38
I realize there is a long trail of questions dealing with problems between 'babel' and 'tikz', at least one of them my own regarding a clash of the quotation environments generated by package quotation with that of babel-Spanish, at the time answered by @egreg, but none quite address the problem I have struck here, involving several languages. — Reinhard Neuwirth, Jul 01 '19 at 09:54

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '19 at 10:06

Adding shorthands=off works:

\usepackage[greek,russian,ngerman,french,spanish,italian,portuguese,english, shorthands=off]{babel}

But now you should also use

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

or use one of the unicode-based engines.

Problem with babel and TikZ if any of russian, ngerman, spanish or portuguese are used

1 Answers1