The usual way to type the « and » characters in LaTeX is to use the commands "<, for «, and ">, for », while using the babel package with the italian option, and the inputenc package with the utf8 option.
This always worked for me, but since yesterday this combination doesn't work anymore. For instance, this is the way this MWE is rendered:
\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[italian]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
"<Hello world!">
\end{document}
I realized this while working on a document on which I was using more or less ten different packages, so I initially thought that some packages maybe were conflicting with others, but then I tried to render a previous document on which the « and » characters were correctly displayed, without changing anything in the code, and they were now displayed this way too.
Do you have a clue about what's going on?
The TeX version I'm using is this one:
TeX 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2015/dev/Debian)
\setactivedoublequoteafter loadingbabel. Trytexdoc babel-italianand read the caption of table 1.\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}and then you just have to type<<Hello world>>(no\setactivedoublequoteneeded for this).\setactivedoublequoteworks. I never used it though :\csquotesto handle your quotes without bad surprises.