[Tex/LaTex] Hanging punctuation with quotation marks in left margin

indentationpunctuationquoting

Plain TeX has a method of creating hanging punctuation, where a punctuation mark/character immediately to the left of some text sits effectively in the margin.

I want to do this with quotes, so that the body of the quotation text is indented on both sides, but the opening quotation marks are to the left of the opening character. This is the effect I want:

``Lord Bacon, in 'the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of
  honor,' assigns the first place to 'the Conditores Imperiorum, 
  founders of States and Commonwealths'; and, truly, to build up from 
  the discordant elements of our nature the passions, the interests, 
  and the opinions of the individual man, the rivalries of family, clan, 
  and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position, the
  accidents of peace and war accumulated for ages,– to build up from these 
  oftentimes warring elements a well-compacted, prosperous, and powerful 
  State, if it were to be accomplished by one effort or in one generation
  would require a more than mortal skill.''

I can do this with quote:

\begin{quote}
{}\hspace{-5pt}{``}Lord Bacon, in 'the true marshalling

would require a more than mortal skill.''   
\end{quote}

but that seems clumsy. Is there a better method?

Best Answer

Your method, {}\hspace{-5pt}{``}, is clumsy insofar as you have to guess at the actual width of the leading quotes ``. A way to avoid that calculation is with the macro \makebox[0pt][r]{``} which places a right-aligned box of zero-width, effectively lapping the text to the left. As you see, however, it doesn't save much typing.

So one way to deal with that is to put that macro into its own \def, call it \andIquote, so that, as in the first example of my MWE, one merely calls on \andIquote as the first item in the quote.

Perhaps a better way, as I do for the second quote, is to create a new environment, I call it quoted, which automatically places quotes at the beginning and end of the environment.

\documentclass{article}
\def\andIquote{\makebox[0pt][r]{``}}
\newenvironment{quoted}
{\quote\andIquote\ignorespaces}{\unskip''\endquote}
\begin{document}

\begin{quote}
\andIquote Lord Bacon, in 'the true marshalling

would require a more than mortal skill.''   
\end{quote}

\begin{quoted}
Lord Bacon, in 'the true marshalling

would require a more than mortal skill.   
\end{quoted}
\end{document}

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