ellipsis in German quotation marks

Question

What's the right way to typeset an ellipsis in German quotation marks?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\mathtoolsset{mathic=true} %%% See https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/3496/
\begin{document}
Terme schreiben wir in Anführungszeichen "`\dots"'. %or "`\ldots"'
\end{document}

produces, when compiled with pdflatex,

Terme schreiben wir in Anführungszeichen „… “.

What's the canonical way to get rid of the space between … and “? Surely, we can write something like

\kern.1em\textellipsis\kern-.12em

, but the kerning amounts would be guessed and might not be portable when you change font families.

"`\dots\unkern"' might be worth a try, but what exactly 'looks right' is a matter of taste. — moewe, Mar 04 '19 at 12:58
How is the mathtools stuff relevant to this question? mathic only applies to $...$ — daleif, Mar 04 '19 at 13:13
\dots and friends are defined via amsmath, which is loaded by mathtools. — daleif, Mar 04 '19 at 13:26

moewe · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-04T13:21:02.310

One way could be to cancel out the kerning after the ellipsis with \unkern. I got the idea from browsing the csquotes documentation to see how csquotes handles its ellipsis.

Terme schreiben wir in Anführungszeichen "`\dots\unkern"'.

$Terme schreiben wir in Anführungszeichen "`\dots\unkern"'.$

The spacing seems less excessive now, but one might still feel the need for a little manual extra correction. What exactly looks right is to a certain degree a matter of taste.

It might be worth a try to use centred dots or one centred placeholder symbol instead of dots on the baseline. That way the apparent asymmetry with the closing upper quotation mark could be alleviated. Alternatively you could just fill in a dummy term.

ellipsis in German quotation marks

1 Answers1