[Tex/LaTex] Why won’t the quotation marks and dash be shown correctly

punctuation

I tried to write a document having a dash after a quotation mark. However, pdflatex has problems to show the document correctly. It looks like the second quotation mark is missing and the second dash is too short and there is an extra hyphen.

\documentclass[a4paper]{amsart}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[finnish]{babel}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
a --- b --- "a" --- b
\end{document}

The following seems to work corretly but I'm not sure if it is a proper way to solve the problem:

a --- b --- "a"\,\! --- b

Best Answer

Quotes should be produced with

``a''

or, as you use UTF-8

“a”

but never with the undirected quotes, particularly using babel, which makes " a shorthand prefix for Finnish. So you want either

a --- b --- ``a'' --- b

or

a --- b --- “a” --- b
Related Question