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The csquotes package does a very good job automatically placing quotation marks instead of dumb quotes in the input. This works well in many languages (e.g. English, or Lithuanian ), however there is a case that it does not currently handle. That is the case when to closing quotes fall together. In Balto-Slavic languages, such as Latvian, Russian, or Belarusian this leads to unbalanced quotes, e.g.

  работа В.И. Ленина «О карикатуре на марксизм 
  и об «империалистическом экономизме»

That is

  The paper by V.I. Lenin «A caricature of Marxism 
  and «Imperialist Economism»

Note two opening quotes and only one closing quote.

Here

\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}
...
работа В.И. Ленина "О карикатуре на марксизм 
и об "империалистическом экономизме"

would cause

! Package csquotes Error: Unbalanced groups or invalid nesting.

I have come up with a small hack that seems to place the quotes correctly in my documents, however it would be nice to have a general solution.

Community
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Dima Chubarov
  • 191

1 Answers1

1

Here is what works for me. It is based on the following observation:

Closing quotes are the ones followed by a space or a punctuation mark, and all other quotes are opening quotes

This rule can be implemented using \new@ifnextchar command from amsgen.sty that does not ignore spaces:

\usepackage{amsgen}
\makeatletter
\def\smartquote{\new@ifnextchar\@sptoken{\rightquote}{%
   \@ifnextchar.{\rightquote}{%
     \@ifnextchar,{\rightquote}{%
        \@ifnextchar){\rightquote}{\leftquote}}}}}
\def\leftquote{<<}
\def\rightquote{>>}
\makeatother

To bind this \smartquote to the double quote character one could use a method making double quote active:

\newcommand{\setupsmartquotes}{%
  \catcode`\"=\active %
  \begingroup
  \lccode`\~=`\"
  \lowercase{\endgroup
    \def~{\smartquote}}}

Now to override babel definitions \setupsmartquotes can be used in \AtBeginDocument and after \selectlanguage for languages that make double quotes active.

\AtBeginDocument{\setupsmartquotes}

This would produce the expected result:

Expected result

Dima Chubarov
  • 191