[Tex/LaTex] No space after closing double quote

babellanguagespunctuationspacing

As the title says, there's no spacing after my closing quotes, I have boiled my huge preamble down to the following,

% Manual: http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf
\documentclass[a4paper,oneside,article]{memoir}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[danish]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

\begin{document}
Hello "I AM A" DUMMY SENTENCE
\end{document}

Which renders to

Hello "I AM A"DUMMY SENTENCE

And I would really like it to become

Hello "I AM A" DUMMY SENTENCE

I'm using the MikTex package for windows and my editor is TexMaker.

I looked at the Spacing after closing double quotes in XeLaTeX but I don't think the solution applies since I don't think I'm loading any CJK packages.

Best Answer

The babel package turns " into an active character (so-called shorthands) that gives nice shortcuts for special treatment of non-English language. (Quick and dirty and typographically wrong work-around would be the use of {}^1,2: "I AM A"{} DUMMY)

Correct danish quotation marks are acquired with "` („) and "' (“).
By the way, since you use utf8 anyway you could input „ and “ directly: „I AM A“

Take a look at the babel manual and its section about the Danish language!

You also might be interested in the csquotes that provides useful macros for quotation. It is also babel-aware and uses the right quotation marks.

Code with `babel`'s shorthands

\documentclass[a4paper,oneside,article]{memoir}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[danish]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

\begin{document}
Hello "`I AM A"' DUMMY SENTENCE
\end{document}

Code with `\enquote` from the `csquotes` package

\documentclass[a4paper,oneside,article]{memoir}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[danish]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\begin{document}
Hello \enquote{I AM A} DUMMY SENTENCE
\end{document}

Output of both variants

Stiff after `"`?

If you are still after the straight double quotation mark ", you can use \textquotedbl.

\documentclass[a4paper,oneside,article]{memoir}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[danish]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

\begin{document}
Hello \textquotedbl I AM A\textquotedbl{} DUMMY SENTENCE 
\end{document}

Ouput with `\textquotedbl`

$\textquotedbl output$

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Space after closing double quotes in XeLaTeX

That's the effect of xeCJK, it uses CJK fonts for these punctuations. If you don't need Japanese text (Sazanami Mincho is a Japanese font), you can delete it and \setCJKmainfont command. And if you use only a little, you can use \makexeCJKinactive to disable xeCJK for most western text of your document. I'm sorry that this command is not well documented in the English part of the manual. (I'm one of the developers of xeCJK.)

An example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xeCJK}
\setCJKmainfont{Adobe Song Std}% a Chinese font
\begin{document}
\makexeCJKinactive

“Western text,” Okey.

\makexeCJKactive
“中文”（Chinese text）
\makexeCJKinactive

\end{document}

enter image description here

BTW, babel may not work well with XeLaTeX and fontspec. However, polyglossia package may conflict with xeCJK, even if you use \makexeCJKinactive, they both use the \XeTeXinterchartoks to change the fonts for different glyphs. I didn't tested, thus I'm not quite sure about the compatibility.

If you use Japanese for only a few words, e.g. names of persons, you don't need xeCJK. You can just change the font manually for these words.

[Tex/LaTex] How to get the closing single quote in math mode

You should switch to text-mode, eg.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Why can't I get $`a\textrm'$ in math mode
\end{document}

Best Answer

Code with babel's shorthands

Code with \enquote from the csquotes package