[Tex/LaTex] How to use apostrophe ‘ with babel french loaded

babelpunctuationtypography

The french apostrophe is the following ’, when babel french is loaded it automatically turns typed apostrophes ' into ’.

How to preserve the apostrophe ' in some cases (quote for example) but not in all the document ?

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[francais]{babel}

\begin{document}
l'exemple d'une apostrophe (it's fine here)\\
quote: 'text of the quote' (it's not,' should be preserved)
\end{document}

Best Answer

The fact you're using babel-french has nothing to do with the problem.

Straight quotes are very rarely used in typography, so when you type the ' character, you get a curly glyph that serves both as a closing quote and as apostrophe.

If you want a straight quote, you can use the glyph provided by textcomp.

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % mandatory for French
\usepackage[francais]{babel}
\usepackage{textcomp}

\begin{document}

l'exemple d'une apostrophe

quote: \textquotesingle text of the quote\textquotesingle

\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to make apostrophes appear normally when copy-pasting from a MS Word document

Word auto corrects input ' to the typographically correct ’. LaTeX does this, too.

You can try to search-and-replace all ’ to ' in Word itself or
Use another input encoding, for example UTF8: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

[Tex/LaTex] Write a class with language dependent strings

The spanish option is not passed to the class, to begin with.

I don't think you really need to have class options for this, however. Here is zunbeltz.cls:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}[1999/12/01]
\ProvidesPackage{zunbeltz}[2012/10/22 v0.1]

\providecommand*{\conclusionsname}{Final conclusions}

\AtBeginDocument{
  \@ifpackagewith{babel}{spanish}{%
    \addto\captionsspanish{\renewcommand*\conclusionsname{Conclusiones finales}}%
  }{}
  \@ifpackagewith{babel}{english}{%
    \addto\captionsenglish{\renewcommand*\conclusionsname{Final conclusions}}%
  }{}
}


\DeclareOption*{\PassOptionsToClass{\CurrentOption}{report}}
\ProcessOptions\relax

\LoadClass{report}

and here the test document zunbeltz.tex:

\documentclass{zunbeltz}
\usepackage[english,spanish]{babel}
\begin{document}
\conclusionsname

\selectlanguage{english}
\conclusionsname
\end{document}

You'll get

Conclusiones finales
Final conclusions

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to make apostrophes appear normally when copy-pasting from a MS Word document

[Tex/LaTex] Write a class with language dependent strings

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