Comments on: Roman Straight Quotes in pdfLaTeX

By: synosure

synosure — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:58:00 +0000

Oops. Okay, so I copy/pasted poorly. For double quotes I meant:
\def\inches{{\feet}\hspace{-0.2em}{\feet}}

I use the same definitions for \minutes and \seconds when typing longitude/latitude markers, and I copied the second one from that code. Good Luck!

By: synosure

synosure — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 02:55:00 +0000

I've fixed this my own way. I insist on the straight lines for things like "5'9" tall." So, I've created my own tags. There are two, one that's a very soft line, the other uses primes, but rotates them to be straight. They work beautifully in pdflatex.

Hard lines (rotated primes):
\def\feet{\hspace{-0.1em}\rotatebox{20}{\hbox{$'$} }\hspace{-0.5em}}

Soft Lines:
\def\feet{\hspace{-0.15em}\rotatebox{45}{\hbox{\textrm\'{}} }\hspace{-0.5em}}

Thats for single quotes. Double quotes are just:
\def\seconds{{\minutes}\hspace{-0.2em}{\minutes}}

The spacing might need to be changed for you. Personally, I use the soft lines when I'm writing.

Straight Quotes shouldn't be this hard!

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:01:55 +0000

Thanks, Jeff. I did not know that. I'm used to seeing them typeset as straight quotes everywhere. Getting primes in LaTeX is easy: $'$ and $''$. The $ means math-mode; for instance, one often sees $f'$ to mean the derivative of f.

By: Jeff Harrell

Jeff Harrell — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 18:44:37 +0000

Doggone it. I obviously meant to say there that prime and double prime are angled marks, not straight like the other marks. Sorry about that.

By: Jeff Harrell

Jeff Harrell — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 18:40:50 +0000

I don't know anything about Latex, but I just wanted to point out something utterly nitpicky. When referring to feet and inches, one technically shouldn't use straight single and double quotes. One should technically use glyphs called "prime" and "double prime." Whereas straight marks are, duh, straight, the prime and double

Latex may not even support these glyphs, so it might be moot. I just felt like throwing it out there.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 18:16:52 +0000

Yes, it uses the Latin Modern fonts. I now see that you wrote a post about them a couple years ago. That's interesting reading.

I used a workaround similar to (a) last month, but wanted to get it right. It still looks a little odd, actually; for some reason \textquotesingle is a bit taller than \textquotedbl.

By: ssp

ssp — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:58:26 +0000

... using T1 encoding is a bad idea when you want to get nice PDFs (basically T1 means you're using the richer EC fonts rather than the CM family, but only the CM family has been converted to proper PostScript fonts).

I haven't used the lmodern package yet but I assume that it'll use the new latin modern PS fonts instead which should be the way to go.

Other reasonably correct ways of cheating might be (a) \texttt{"} or (b) $''$.