Babel support for foreign languages

Question

I want to use a Tufte template adapted from here:

https://www.latextemplates.com/template/tufte-style-book

Also I want to use three languages simultaneously, english, german and greek. Simultaneously means using just only Alt+Shift , and not something like /begin{other language} environment inside the text. That is, I want to use mixed test.

What I have found until now looks something like this:

 \documentclass{something}
 \usepackage[greek, english, german]{Babel}
\begin{document}
\begin{otherlanguage}{english}
 ...
 \end{otherlanguage}{english}
\begin{otherlanguage}{greek}
 ...
 \end{otherlanguage}{greek}
...

Any thought would be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to typeset easily in different languages then your best bet is to switch the engine to something like xelatex. The only caveat is that you must choose a font, and that font needs to have the necessary glyphs in order for them to be printed in the resulting PDF.

You can see an example of this below, since Arial does not possess them to properly display Japanese.

Of course, since you only need to display German, English, and Greek, you have a higher number of fonts to choose from.

Output

Code

\documentclass{article} % works with \documentclass{tufte-book} too
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Arial}
\begin{document}
γεια, αυτό είναι ελληνικό\par
привет, это русский\par
こんにちは、これは日本語です % this is not visible
\vspace{1cm}
\fontspec{HiraMinProN-W3} % switching font to show Japanese
こんにちは、これは日本語です
\end{document}