German opening (lower) quotation mark in plain TeX

Question

Is there a good way to get the German opening (lower) quotation mark „ in plain TeX?

Answer 1

It depends on used encoding. The pure plain TeX with Computer Modern fonts doesn't provide this because the character „ is missing in the Computer Modern fonts. It is inserted at various places in various extension fonts. For example CSfonts have it at slot 254 and csplain defines \clqq as

\chardef\clqq=254

so a user of csplain use it as \clqq. Or T1 encoded fonts have it at slot 18. But this all is history not recommended to use today. We have Unicode fonts and Unicode TeX engines able to load these fonts. If Unicode fonts are loaded (for example in OpTeX after \fontfam), then we can type „ in the TeX source and we get „ in the output.

If we are using a keyboard driver which doesn't support the „ then we can define it for example by

\def\clqq{„}

and then use \clqq in the source document.

Answer 2

You can use the EC fonts, where the lower German quotes are the ligature ,,.

% define accents for T1 encoding
\def\`#1{{\accent0 #1}}
\def\'#1{{\accent1 #1}}
\def\^#1{{\accent2 #1}}
\def\~#1{{\accent3 #1}}
\def\"#1{{\accent4 #1}}
\def\H#1{{\accent5 #1}}
\def\r#1{{\accent6 #1}}
\def\v#1{{\accent7 #1}}
\def\u#1{{\accent8 #1}}
\def\=#1{{\accent9 #1}}
\def\.#1{{\accent10 #1}}
\def\c#1{%
  \leavevmode\setbox0=\hbox{#1}%
  \ifdim\ht0=1ex
    {\accent11 #1}%
  \else
    {\ooalign{\unhbox0\crcr\hidewidth\char11\hidewidth}}%
  \fi
}
\font\tenrm=ecrm1000
\font\tenit=ecti1000
\font\tenbf=ecbx1000
\font\tensl=ecsl1000
\rm
\hrule
\vskip 1in
\centerline{\bf A SHORT STORY}
\vskip 6pt
\centerline{\sl    by A. U. Thor} % !??! (modified)
\vskip .5cm
Once upon a time, in a distant
  galaxy called "O"o\c c,
there lived a computer
named R.~J. Drofnats.
Mr.~Drofnats---or ,,R. J.,'' as
he preferred to be called---% error has been fixed!
was happiest when he was at work
typesetting beautiful documents.
\vskip 1in
\hrule
\vfill\eject
\bye

Of course you would need to support also UTF-8, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/163887/4427

Answer 3

You can just take TeX's ordinary rendering of '' and shove it downward using a negative value for \raise, like this. (I doubt that the \hboxes in my \grqq and \grq are necessary; I just cargo-culted them from \glqq and \glq.)

\def\glqq{\smash{\raise-1.3ex\hbox{''}}}
\def\grqq{\hbox{``}}
\def\glq{\smash{\raise-1.3ex\hbox{'}}}
\def\grq{\hbox{`}}
\hsize 3in
Don Quijote ist der \glqq{}"uberspannte Leser\grqq, der die Welt,
wie sie seine B"ucher schildern, f"ur wirklich h"alt.
\end