Automatically convert quotations in the form of "abc" to become ``abc"

Question

I did not know that latex had different symbol for opening and closing quotation marks. I've used it like "abc" every where and just realised that I really should have used ``abc". Is there anyway I can convert all the quotations to become like ``abc"? Doing it manually will take forever as I have a lot of quotations.

Answer 1

An alternative to quotes is csquotes from 2011, while quotes is from 1997 …

\documentclass[english]{article}

\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

\begin{document}
Hello "World"!
\end{document}

Answer 2

The package csquotes has many more goodies than the one mentioned. If you use the command \enquote{. . .}, you can nest several levels of quotations, while LaTeX preserves the correct couples of signs. You can even set localization preferences in order to use the proper signs for a language.

For instance, \enquote{\enquote{This is a quote within a quote}} will be rendered as:

“‘This is a quote within a quote’”

(with a thin space in between the contiguous signs).

But if you load the csquotes package thus (as I usually do):

\usepackage[autostyle=false, style=british]{csquotes}

the previous code will be rendered thus:

‘“This is a quote within a quote”’

See the documentation of the package for further details (texdoc csquotes).

Answer 3

There is a package for this: quotes. With this package, "text" is typeset correctly as ``text''.

Answer 4

Edit 2 solution suggested by Boris seems to be the easier way.

Depending on which editor you use you can perform a search an replace. You would be searching for

_" 

(replace the underscore with a white space, its just there to make my point) and then replace it by

_``

again, the underscore stands for a white space.

Edit

As David Carlisle pointed out that you should also change the right quote to '' so you get the proper right quote.

However there you have to account for the following characters after the right quote. I know no better way than trying to think of all possibilities (I can think of 4 that are likely)

"_ %your quote is followed by a white space
". %your quote is followed by a period
", %your quote is followed by a comma
"! %your quote is followed by an exclamation mark

then replace each of them with their respective version

''_

etc.

Edit 3 MWE with quotes package

% !TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{quotes}

\begin{document}
\noindent "test" \\
``test''
\end{document}