PDF rendering fails for German (lang: de) due to babel error: Unknown option ngerman

[MarcoPortmann]

I have:

• searched the issue tracker for similar issues
• installed the latest version of Quarto CLI
• formatted my issue following the Bug Reports guide

Bug description

Rendering Quarto documents to PDF fails when using German as the document language. The error originates from LaTeX/babel and appears to be related to recent changes in the babel package concerning German language support.

Minimal reproducible example:

Steps to reproduce

---
title: "Reproducible Quarto Document"
format: pdf
lang: de
---

Actual behavior

Running quarto render results in the following LaTeX error:

Package babel Error: Unknown option 'ngerman'.
(babel)                Suggested actions:
(babel)                * Make sure you haven’t misspelled it
(babel)                * Check in the babel manual that it's supported
(babel)                * If supported and it's a language, you may
(babel)                  need in some distributions a separate
(babel)                  installation
...
Valid options are, among others: shorthands=, KeepShorthandsActive,
activeacute, activegrave, noconfigs, safe=, main=, math=
headfoot=, strings=, config=, hyphenmap=, or a language name.

Expected behavior

Quarto should be able to render a PDF document with lang: de, as this worked previously.

Additional context:

This issue may be related to recent changes in the LaTeX babel package regarding German language handling. See, for example:

latex3/babel#371

It appears that ngerman is no longer accepted as a language option in certain babel versions, but Quarto (or its Pandoc/LaTeX template) may still be emitting it.

Your environment

"Chocolate Cosmos" Release (e4392fc9, 2024-06-05) for Ubuntu Jammy
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/143.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/143.0.0.0, Quarto 1.7.31 (/opt/quarto/bin/quarto)

Quarto check output

Quarto 1.7.31
[✓] Checking environment information...
Quarto cache location: /home/pco/.cache/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
Pandoc version 3.6.3: OK
Dart Sass version 1.85.1: OK
Deno version 1.46.3: OK
Typst version 0.13.0: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
Version: 1.7.31
Path: /opt/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
TinyTeX: v2025.03.10
Chromium: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
Using: TinyTex
Path: /home/pco/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux
Version: 2025

[✓] Checking Chrome Headless....................OK
Chrome: (not detected)

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
Version: 3.10.12
Path: /usr/bin/python3
Jupyter: (None)

  Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
  Install with python3 -m pip install jupyter

[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
Version: 4.4.1
Path: /usr/local/lib/R
LibPaths:
- /usr/local/lib/R/site-library
- /usr/local/lib/R/library
- /home/pco/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.4
knitr: 1.51
rmarkdown: 2.30

[✓] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

[mcanouil]

Have you looked at all the other issues about this?
Such as:

• Quarto does not detect missing package from this LaTeX babel error  #12732

Could you upgrade your setup? You can re not using current stable version of Quarto CLI (1.8) and you are also using a one year old TinyTex.

Note that I can't reproduce any issue with the code provided and current versions of the tools.

[jspitz]

This issue may be related to recent changes in the LaTeX babel package regarding German language handling. See, for example:

latex3/babel#371

It appears that ngerman is no longer accepted as a language option in certain babel versions, but Quarto (or its Pandoc/LaTeX template) may still be emitting it.

ngerman has never been dropped and will continue to work in the future, although it is deprecated and discouraged. So the problems here must have different causes.