What kinds of constructions are `, --, ---, and ``?

Asked Dec 23 '20 at 17:52

Active Dec 23 '20 at 18:04

Viewed 37 times

A couple of questions of a similar nature:

We all know that -- prints an endash, while --- prints an emdash. But - is not an active character, right? So how does TeX process -- and --- and make them different from three ordinary dashes?
`` prints a “. But ` is not an active character, right? So similarly to above, how is this processed?
' is an active character, so I guess no issue there.
The character ` plus some character token prints the character number (or whatever the right term is) for that token, as seen e.g. in catcode assignments. What kind of construction is this? Can I change this to some other character?
Is there a way to print ` on TeX.SX? Typing ``` doesn’t work.

edited Dec 23 '20 at 17:55

asked Dec 23 '20 at 17:52

Gaussler

These are ligatures like ff or fl. I'm pretty sure this has been asked before… – cgnieder Dec 23 '20 at 17:54
@cgnieder Not all of the questions, I think. – Gaussler Dec 23 '20 at 17:54
See What is (backtick) used for?](https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/404649/82917) and [How does “\char” work? for the fourth question. Note that the backtick does not always give a number: it works only when TeX expects a number. – campa Dec 23 '20 at 17:59
When I asked a similar question https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/569020/modify-add-to-tex-ligatures I learned that they were simply called Tex ligatures. – Ingmar Dec 23 '20 at 18:00
The questions about ligatures are duplicate; the last question belongs to the Meta site. – egreg Dec 23 '20 at 18:07
1

For the last question, see https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3150. – muzimuzhi Z Dec 23 '20 at 18:24
' is not an active character despite your 3rd bullet. – David Carlisle Dec 23 '20 at 21:44

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