[Tex/LaTex] ditto symbol

Question

I believe that a symbol -||- is commonly used to indicate repetition of a fragment of text. The problem is that typesetting it using dashes and pipes looks kind of ugly. Is there a predefined symbol for that?

EDIT: Seems this is a localized version of a ditto mark:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_mark

Is there a way to typeset it in LaTeX?

Answer 1

You are referring to the ditto mark, which is actually a special Unicode character (U+3003) looking like this:

Unicode Character 'DITTO MARK' (U+3003): 〃

Using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, you could use this character directly, provided that you use a font the has support for this symbol. However, the Wikipedia article cited above mentions that

[...] in practice closing double quotation marks (”) or straight double quotation marks (") are often used instead [of the Unicode symbol]

so you might as well use something like

\newcommand*{\dittoclosing}{---''---}
\newcommand*{\dittostraight}{---\textquotedbl---} % available in T1 encoding

(The latter requires you to use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}).

The result looks like this: