59

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}}
Improve this question

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
65

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.

Improve this answer
7
  • 10
    I'd probably favour csquotes, as it means you keep the semantics of the mark-up and can reuse the source in other places more readily.
    – Joseph Wright ♦
    Sep 2, 2010 at 18:34
  • 14
    Unfortunately it is indeed spelled incorrectly. It should be guillemetleft and guillemetright (with an "e"). A guillemot with an "o" is a seabird :-) But I think we're stuck with it.
    – Peter Flynn
    Jan 19, 2012 at 10:48
  • @PeterFlynn In my case it works only with ''o''.
    – Dog_69
    Oct 16, 2019 at 22:51
  • 2
    Of course. Read what I said. It was misspelled when created.
    – Peter Flynn
    Jan 4, 2020 at 12:19
  • See my last answer, \MarkOuterQuote{"} is simpler with csquote package
    – Metal3d
    Apr 28, 2020 at 7:01
32

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

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lmodern}

\begin{document}

<<Quoted text>>.

\end{document}
Improve this answer
3
  • 1
    Nice and intuitive!
    – Hendrik Vogt
    Mar 8, 2011 at 15:59
  • Tried inside a knitr document. and this was the only way that really worked for me. I must admit I am surprised cause the other answers looked sound, too. However thanks Andrey!
    – hans0l0
    Dec 19, 2012 at 9:45
  • Does not work for me. I use koma-script book with babel
    – lalebarde
    May 6, 2014 at 15:03
17

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).

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    I think you can add the due non-breaking spaces manually with the ~ character.
    – Olivier
    Feb 26, 2023 at 21:45
13

I find this way is very convenient:

package: \usepackage[frenchb]{babel}

in text: \og text \fg{}

Improve this answer
2
  • 4
    This is indeed the correct way when using French with babel.
    – egreg
    Oct 31, 2014 at 20:35
  • @egreg and wrong for non-French text.
    – vonbrand
    Sep 1, 2018 at 23:09
4

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 »

Improve this answer
3
  • This did not work in French for me.
    – Cedric
    Aug 3, 2020 at 13:04
  • Weird, it works perfectly for me (I'm french)
    – Metal3d
    Jan 9, 2021 at 8:35
  • Have you tried with Babel, cause it definitely worked here
    – Tiwenty
    Jul 21, 2021 at 15:35
2

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}
Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    The OP requests this without use of Babel. Also, Babel has various unwanted side effects such as hyphenation, change of parindent in the first line, change of itemization bullets etc.
    – Nobody-Knows-I-am-a-Dog
    Mar 28, 2021 at 21:14

You must log in to answer this question.