[Tex/LaTex] Ideal Setup for Swiss-Style Quotes (Quotation Marks in German-speaking Switzerland)

punctuation

As far as I know Switzerland uses French quotes but without whitespace.
So instead of

« citation »

it goes like this

«citation»

(to make it more confusing, in Germany they have the alternative use of »citation«)

I am going quite well with the double quotes because on one side I do find them on my Swiss keyboard (AltGr+y/x) and there is also a nice way on English or German keyboards which then gets rendered

<<citation>>

So the first question actually is if it is fine to just use the French quotes without spaces. Typographically there is quite some difference. Do I completely mess it up by just miss-using this stuff for Swiss citation?

I also do have a problem with the single quotes.

‹ french › and ‹swiss›

I don't find them on my keyboard and simply use of English keys like <cite> does not work either. What I do for now is just copy and paste the original letters which I copied from wikipedia. Of course I can also use \flq and \frq (or \frqq and \flqq for double quotes) but this does still not answer the above question.

So again:

  • Any ideas and hints for simplifying single quotes?
  • Is the approach of turned French quotes the right solution at all for Swiss style?

Or in general terms: What would be a recommended ideal setup for Swiss quotations?

Best Answer

You could use the csquotes package. Together with the babel package it should take care of the quotes automatically (cf. example below).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[german=swiss]{csquotes}
\begin{document}
    \enquote{Text \enquote{Quote in quote} more text}
\end{document}

This renders as:

enter image description here

As pointed out in the comments, adding \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} improves the rendering of the quotes:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[german=swiss]{csquotes}
\begin{document}
    \enquote{Text \enquote{Quote in quote} more text}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Additionally to the context sensitive way, single quotes can also be set explicitly (if needed on first level):

\enquote*{Enforced single quotes}