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Is there some way using csquotes to emit text without the closing quotation mark?

When a speaker's words run for more than one paragraph, the English publishing convention is to use quotation marks at the beginning of the quotation, at the beginning of each subsequent paragraph, and at the end of the whole quotation.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}

“I read a spell-binding mystery yesterday,” Agnes said. “It gripped me on the first page, and I couldn’t put the book down until I had finished.


“The plot is simple, almost classic. Five people are sitting in a room watching home movies. When the lights come on, one of the people is dead. Who did it? How was it done?


“Of course, no one has entered or left the room during the movies; thus, one of the other four people in the room has done it. I, of course, thought of poison—but that was wrong.


“Well, the detective arrives, and the questioning begins. As the story unfolds, you learn that everyone has a motive. The plot thickens. The mystery isn’t solved until the last page, and it had me fooled. Whew! I’m exhausted from the suspense!”


\end{document}

enter image description here I am trying to duplicate this effect using csquotes, but as far as I can tell csquotes always matches opening and closing quotation marks, so it can't be done. Is that correct?

Guy Middleton
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  • I would like to be wrong, but I fear you are correct. It makes sense that csquotes needs the quotes to come in pairs since it has to keep track of inner versus outer etc. So maybe what's needed is an invisible closing quote which will satisfy the pairing requirement without printing anything .... – cfr Nov 23 '23 at 00:47
  • This is beyond insane. It's even more insane than the whole "quotation marks inside punctuation" style that American English seems to use. But as @cfr says it might be possible to have an empty closing quote to create an unbalanced quote style. – Alan Munn Nov 23 '23 at 02:06
  • @AlanMunn The punctuation convention is insane, the question is insane or an empty marker is insane? [Edit: or something else or some combination is insane?] – cfr Nov 23 '23 at 02:47
  • Can you say whether the existing answer suits your needs or whether you want to be able to use input which uses unbalanced quotes, as opposed to just producing output which uses them? Can you also show us how you're using csquotes? There are different ways of accessing its features e.g. active quotes or macros or whatever. – cfr Nov 23 '23 at 02:49
  • @cfr The question is definitely not insane but the convention certainly is. – Alan Munn Nov 23 '23 at 02:56
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    @AlanMunn It's illogical from a nesting point of view, but I'm not sure it's insane. What would be better would be a third kind of punctuation mark for continuation (one for each existing pair of marks used as quotation marks). But we don't have those, so either you rely on readers to remember opening and closing quotation marks in previous paragraphs (which could mean pages) or you have to use a single mark for two different things and rely on readers to discriminate between start-of-quote and continued-quote based on context. The latter is more readily decidable than the former. – cfr Nov 23 '23 at 03:26
  • @cfr The intent is to take source text originally in Markdown and convert to LaTeX. The Markdown currently uses the continued-speaker quotation convention as described, but it would be unreasonable (or perhaps insane) to expect csquotes to cope with unbalanced marks on input. – Guy Middleton Nov 23 '23 at 23:49
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    @GuyMiddleton Actually, I played around with it and you can get it to accept unbalanced input e.g. output-like input. I posted it as a proof-of-concept, but then I deleted it lest the unwary try it at home. – cfr Nov 24 '23 at 02:45

1 Answers1

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The csquotes package can automatically insert opening quotation marks at the beginning of each paragraph for you if you define a new quotation style like this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\DeclareQuoteStyle{quoteeverypar}
  {\textquotedblleft}[\textquotedblleft]{\textquotedblright}
  {\textquoteleft}[\textquoteleft]{\textquoteright}
\setquotestyle{quoteeverypar}
\MakeAutoQuote{“}{”}
\begin{document}

“I read a spell-binding mystery yesterday,” Agnes said. “It gripped me on the first page, and I couldn’t put the book down until I had finished.


The plot is simple, almost classic. Five people are sitting in a room watching home movies. When the lights come on, one of the people is dead. Who did it? How was it done?


Of course, no one has entered or left the room during the movies; thus, one of the other four people in the room has done it. I, of course, thought of poison—but that was wrong.


Well, the detective arrives, and the questioning begins. As the story unfolds, you learn that everyone has a motive. The plot thickens. The mystery isn’t solved until the last page, and it had me fooled. Whew! I’m exhausted from the suspense!”
\end{document}

The trick is to specify the "middle marks" in the optional arguments to \DeclareQuoteStyle (see section 8.1 of the documentation).

Removing the now superfluous opening quotation marks, you'll get the desired output.

Robert
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