61

Is there a small package free way of implementing something like this in pdflatex and LaTeX?

I wish for the outcome of 

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
    `It's a nice day!'
\end{document}

To be

ʻIt's a nice day!ʼ

I know that due to there being a single apostrophe inside the quote can mess up stuff, so I'm more then happy to use a function or macro, like \apos, to insert it.

I know that the apostrophe I want has the Unicode value of 39, so is in the standard ASCII implementation. "U+0027 ' apostrophe (HTML: ' ') typewriter apostrophe."

Improve this question
  • In addition to the duplicate, see also tex.stackexchange.com/a/63348/9077 – Sverre Apr 22 '14 at 16:42
  • 2
    The "duplicate" question and its answers are specifically about unicode and fontspec, which isn't the case here. I voted to re-open – David Carlisle Apr 22 '14 at 18:16
69

It's a rather unusual convention, but if you want it then:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\begin{document}
    `It\textquotesingle s a nice day!'
\end{document}
Improve this answer
  • Is that actually the proper character to use for an apostrophe? So should I always be writing it\textquotesingle s if I want to be technically correct? – David Z Apr 23 '14 at 0:36
  • 11
    @DavidZ no it's horrible:-) The normal usage is to use ' but the OP asked for a straight quote and if that's what he wants, this is the latex markup to get it. – David Carlisle Apr 23 '14 at 0:40
  • 1
    Apostrophe, open-single-quote, close-single-quote, are all different characters, but ascii over loaded apostrophe onto close-single-quote (I think). I Think that unicode has added separate characters. I don't know about latex. – ctrl-alt-delor Apr 6 '16 at 20:03
33

David's answer is preferable, but here's another option if you don't want to load any package to take care of it.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
`It\textsc{\char13}s a nice day!'
\end{document}

enter image description here

Improve this answer
  • 5
    Perfect! It took reading through so many pages of COMPLICATED answers to find this simple solution. Now I can define a new command for the rare times I want this: \newcommand*\vtick{\textsc{\char13}} and then just place \vtick in my document where I want it to appear. – Travis Bemrose Mar 13 '15 at 2:35
  • 3
    This seems to font dependent. If I use revtex with \usepackage{times} it does not work. – lovespeed Sep 1 '15 at 16:48
  • 5
    @TravisBemrose - Note that the method depends on both the font encoding -- it works for the basic OT1 encoding, but not for T1 -- and the font family; as shown above, it works for Computer Modern, but it may not work with any other font families. This is probably why Sverre wrote, "David's answer is preferable." :-) – Mico Apr 9 '16 at 6:44

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.