[Tex/LaTex] Backticks versus real quote marks

symbolssyntaxunicode

So, I'm a Mac user, and a little bit of a type nut (probably not compared to many users on here, though! :P)

I've been happily typing emdashes and curly-quotes on my keyboard for years, and years: ⌥⇧-, ⌥[ / ⌥⇧[ … you get the idea. Now, LaTeX has been pretty wonderful so far, but I've been studiously avoiding junk like \wedge or --- or `` where just typing the damn Unicode character would work perfectly fine (Hon.m unicode-math!) … but I'm definitely getting the impression that that's going against the grain in this community, and I want to write what's perceived as clean, idiomatic code, so …

Is there any typesetting benefit or purpose to using `` instead of “, and similar LaTeX conventions, in the source-code to your LaTeX document?

Best Answer

Assuming that you have unicode input correctly declared either via 

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

or using xelatex or lualatex then `` will ligature to “ and produce identical output.

So the pros and cons are all about the human interface to editing, not about latex.

Most latex users use ascii input as they have been using it for a long time, but even now it has some advantages as many people learn (or copy what they did before) by viewing the source, for most people, with most keyboards it does not require any instruction to know how to type `` or \infty but it may not be so clear (and the instructions will be very system and locale specific) how to type “ or ∞.

For example I did not recognise your ⌥⇧- at all but the first character is U+2325 which is OPTION KEY which I vaguely remember being the name of one of the modifier keys on a Mac keyboard.

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