Single quote mark spacing problem

Question

Using ShareLaTex, when I enter the line: . . . range of \textquoteleft interpretive tendencies\textquoteright or adjacent . . . The result that comes back is:

. . . range of 'interpretive tendencies'or adjacent . . .

where I need to have it display:

. . . tendencies' or adjacent . . .

with space between ' and "or". Should I be using a different command here or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

By default, LaTeX gobbles all spaces after any command. So, you can have three solutions here:

1. Add a forced space after the right quote by using \ after \textquoteright followed by a space.
2. Simply use ' instead of \textquoteright.
3. Use the \xspace command from xspace package to get intelligent spaces.

See the solutions below:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{xspace}

\begin{document}


\textquoteleft interpretive tendencies\textquoteright\ or adjacent 

`interpretive tendencies' or adjacent 

\textquoteleft interpretive tendencies\textquoteright\xspace or adjacent 


\end{document}

Answer 2

Use the csquotes package for a semantic, configurable and language aware quoting command:

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

\begin{document}

range of \enquote*{interpretive tendencies} or adjacent

\end{document}