Avoid inverted exclamation and question marks, when followed by quotes

Question

In an automated system that is generating LaTeX to render PostScript and PDF, i need to avoid an ambiguity in LaTeX:

Two backticks (``) produce a closing doublequote: “
A question/exclamation mark followed by a backtick (?`) produces the inverted character: ¿
Combined, when trying to display a question mark followed by a quote (,,what?``), LaTeX produces the following output: „what¿‘

What is the best practise to avoid this? The desired output is: „what?“

Are you using this for German? – egreg Feb 07 '14 at 13:49 — egreg, Feb 07 '14 at 13:49
@egreg yes! does it make a difference? – Kaii Feb 07 '14 at 13:58 — Kaii, Feb 07 '14 at 13:58

egreg · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-07T14:04:38.630

You can disable the ligatures using microtype:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{microtype}
\DisableLigatures[?,!]{encoding=T1}

\begin{document}
,,Hier?``

,,Hier!``
\end{document}

enter image description here

Or teach the automated system to use UTF-8 and input the “real” characters:

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

\begin{document}
„Hier?“

„Hier!“
\end{document}

As cgnieder suggests, there's another possibility:

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

\begin{document}
"`Hier?"'

"`Hier!"'
\end{document}

More possibilities: babel shortcuts "` and "' for the quotes or using csquotes :) — cgnieder, Feb 07 '14 at 14:01

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 03 '16 at 10:02

0

I simply used curly braces:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
test?{``}
\end{document}

seems to work ;-)

edited Oct 03 '16 at 10:02

Henri Menke

109,596

answered Oct 03 '16 at 09:36

Simeon

11

Sorry, it doesn't work. Typeset this example with LuaLaTeX (screenshot). – Henri Menke Oct 03 '16 at 09:58
@HenriMenke with pdflatex I seem to get the desired ?“ (but perhaps with a larger than desired spacing after the ?) – Dai Bowen Oct 03 '16 at 10:07

Avoid inverted exclamation and question marks, when followed by quotes

2 Answers2