What is the best way to use quotation mark glyphs?

Question

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?

Answer 1

A quick summary of the available solutions:

1. Type ``text'' in your source code to produce “text”, and type `text' to produce ‘text’.

2. Using an Unicode editor—and either \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} or XeTeX/LuaTeX—you can simply type “text” or ‘text’ in your code.

3. With the csquotes package, you type \enquote{text}, but you also get loads of other options such as context sensitivity and foreign quotes.

Answer 2

No discussion of quotation marks in LaTeX is complete without reference to the csquotes package.

Answer 3

TeX/LaTeX display the real quotation marks by default: ` and `` are converted to opening quotation marks; ' and '' are closing quotation marks. You'll generally always see the curved quotes in the output, in the default font. You should always quote like

``this''

and not like ''this'' or "this", because that appears like ”this” (closing quotation marks on both sides), and is very annoying to readers. (If you type the double quote character in Emacs, it automatically guesses whether you meant to insert `` or ''; other editors probably do too.)

You can also directly enter the curved quote characters if you like, if you're using an environment that supports Unicode input: either \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, or XeTeX/LuaTeX. See the question on glyph insertion.

Answer 4

I have always simply used two backticks, ``, to create an opening quotation mark, and two apostrophe's, '', to create a closing one. In fact, many editors will automatically keep track of which one you need next and enter it if you type the 'regular' quotation mark, ".