punctuationsymbols
There are several types of quotation marks in the English language (and in other languages there are even more). There are also several ways in LaTeX to represent these. I have seen editors, that are capable of directly entering “ and ”. And I have also seen things like this `''.
So, what is the best way to do English quotation marks in LaTeX?
If you use biblatex or multiple languages with babel or polyglossia, you can benefit from the integrated commands of csquotes. There are commands to quote in languages other than the main language so that the quoted text is typeset in accordance with the rules of the language. There are also commands to make formal quotes, both in the main language and in other languages, that gets the proper quotation marks from csquotes and a reference via biblatex.
If you use these commands rather than manually setting quotation marks, it may be easier to be consistent with quotations and hyphenation. Also, it can help you to be consistent with block quotes because csquotes has commands to make block quotes out of quotations that are longer than a certain threshold.
Here is an example of just a few of the available commands. You can read about the other commands in the manual.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[UKenglish,USenglish]{babel}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{nnt,
author = {N.N.},
title = {Title},
year = {2011}
}
\end{filecontents*}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\hyphenquote{UKenglish}{quote with UK English hyphenation}
\textcquote[1]{nnt}{formal quote}
\hyphentextcquote{UKenglish}[1]{nnt}{formal quote with UK English hyphenation}
\hyphenblockcquote{UKenglish}[1]{nnt}{A long formal quote with UK English hyphenation which happens to be longer than three lines and, thus, is typeset as a block quote. This text is just to make it long enough. This text is just to make it long enough. This text is just to make it long enough.}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
If you find it bothering to write the macros of csquotes you can use a snippet manager for the ones that you use often. For example, in my setup I write enq and press Tab which expands enq to enquote{} and places the cursor between the braces. See Replace the `$$ ... $$` macro with the `\[ ... \]` macros? - Prefer the way LaTeX lays it out, but `$` are faster to write for a more elaborate example of snippet managers.
If you use AUCTeX, it can be configured so that " expands to csquotes macros by inserting the following into your .emacs:
;; " expands into csquotes macros
(setq LaTeX-csquotes-close-quote "}"
LaTeX-csquotes-open-quote "\\enquote{")
Note that for this to work in conjunction with babel, babel must be loaded after csquotes.
This is yet another reason to switch to biblatex (here: in combination with csquotes). (And with biblatex-trad there's even a trad-plain style!)
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[british,french]{babel}
\usepackage[french=guillemets]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=trad-plain,babel=other]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{A2012,
hyphenation = {british},
author = {Author, A},
title = {A \enquote{paper}: written in english?},
journal = {Journal},
year = {2012},
volume = {2},
pages = {70--76},
}
@article{B2012,
hyphenation = {french},
author = {Auteur, B},
title = {Un \enquote{article}: \'ecrit en fran\c{c}ais?},
journal = {Journal},
year = {2012},
volume = {2},
pages = {77--79},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{A2012}, \cite{B2012}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Best Answer
A quick summary of the available solutions:
Using an Unicode editor you can simply type
“text”or‘text’in your code. This should work in XeTeX/LuaTeX and recent versions of LaTeX, just make sure your source file is saved with UTF-8 encoding.In older versions of LaTeX you might need to add
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}for this input method to work.Type
``text''in your source code to produce “text”, and type`text'to produce ‘text’.With the
csquotespackage, you type\enquote{text}, but you also get loads of other options such as context sensitivity and foreign quotes.