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/