Quote marks are backwards (using texmaker/PDFLatex) [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What is the best way to use quotation mark glyphs
Automatically convert quotations in the form of “abc” to become ``abc"

I am (obviously) new to LaTeX and have about 40 pages of text where it seems like half the quote marks are going the wrong way for American English. The opening and closing quotes are both pointing the same way (as if they were all closing quotes). I copied some text from MS Word to texmaker, but I believe that's unrelated because this version, with my headers and newly typed text, does the same thing (using PDFLatex):

\documentclass[11pt,letterpaper,titlepage]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage[top=1.25in, bottom=1.25in, left=1.25in, right=1.25in]{geometry}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\apptocmd{\thebibliography}{\raggedright}{}{}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage[hyphens]{url}
\author{Me}
\title{Hello world}
\begin{document}
\section*{Acknowledgements}
Here are some people I'd like to thank. "Thanks!"
\end{document}

The single quote in "I'd" is curled right and so is the double quote after !. But the one before Thanks goes the wrong way. They all appear to be straight in the editor window.

My understanding is that little inline quotes like this is not what \quote{} is for. Is there some way to fix that doesn't involve going through all 40 pages with a fine-toothed comb?

Answer 1

LaTeX tends to require you to use

`` <quoted text here> '' 

for double quotes and

` <quoted text here> '

for single quotes. The "smart quotes" will be done by the compilers.

if you have already typed your text with " " throughout your document you can use the csquotes package to deal with them:

\usepackage [english]{babel}
\usepackage [autostyle, english = american]{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

Adding this to your preamble will use the double quotation mark character as your delimiter for outer quotes. csquotes will then translate it to what it needs to be in your chosen language, which in your case is american english and so will appear as “ ”. You should therefore have nothing else to change in your document.

Answer 2

Opening quotes are `` and closing quotes are ". For instance,

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

``Thanks!"

\end{document}

For greater control over your quotations (in particular, for your concrete "search and replace" problem), you could consider using the csquotes package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}

\begin{document}

\enquote{Thanks!}

\end{document}