Guillemets in LaTeX («»)

Question

I need the characters «» in my LaTeX document. I'm writing in English though, and I don't want to use Babel. I have the following hack but I'd like a better way:

\newcommand{\q}[1]{{%
\font\larm = larm1000%
\larm%
\char 190}{#1}{%
\font\larm = larm1000%
\larm%
\char 191}}

Answer 1

There are several ways to do this:

• With standard methods, you will find \guillemotleft and \guillemotright. For this you need \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} (which is recommended anyways).
• Using the language switching capabilities of babel, e.g. \foreignlanguage.
• Using csquotes and its \foreignquote command.

Personally, I would recommend the third option.

The similar looking mathmode symbols ≪ and ≫ (much less/greater than) are created with \ll and \gg.

Answer 2

There's also a convenient way to do it with Latin Modern:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lmodern}

\begin{document}

<<Quoted text>>.

\end{document}

Answer 3

You could type it directly if you use an utf8 encoding :

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
«For example.»
\end{document}

But, the automatic spacing isn't correct — at least for French typography. As suggested in the comments, you can always input manually the correct spacing (~, for non-breaking space).

Answer 4

I find this way is very convenient:

package: \usepackage[frenchb]{babel}

in text: \og text \fg{}

Answer 5

The best I now use in french is:

\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

I now can use " to as "guillemet" and it's correctly replaced by « and »

Answer 6

I tried several of those options all leading to a small square instead of «». This did the trick for me.

\documentclass{article}  
\usepackage[francais]{babel} % guillemets \og text \fg{}
\usepackage{aeguill} % guillemets
 \begin{document}
 \og text \fg{}
 \end{document}