There is a convention in American typesetting that punctuation marks such as commas and periods should not come immediately after a closing quotation mark; instead they should be moved inside. It seems to me that this creates an obvious problem that I've never seen discussed anywhere: how much space goes after the closing quotation mark?? Since the sentence just ended, it seems an inter-sentence space is fitting, especially since quote marks are bigger than periods and hence more likely to seem "too close" to the following text. But TeX won't do this by default, and I can't think of a way to accomplish this that doesn't seem terribly hacky. But surely this is a common problem faced by millions of people, and thousands of them use LaTeX. What gives?
MWE:
\documentclass{minimal}
\begin{document}
'. 9 % inter-sentence space
.' 9 % inter-word space
\end{document}
minimal
is too minimal. Better use, e.g.,article
, for MWE.