Quotes & dashes

Typing the straight quote key " or a plain hyphen - and leaving it at that is the single most common typographic mistake in LaTeX. TeX has a long-standing convention: you type the opening quote with a backtick and the closing quote with an apostrophe, and you repeat the hyphen to get the right curly quotes “ ” ‘ ’ and the dashes – —. This page covers that input convention and the modern, language-aware way to do it — \enquote from csquotes.

Quotes: type left and right differently

In Western text, opening and closing quotes have different shapes (“ vs ”, ‘ vs ’). The keyboard, however, only offers the directionless straight quotes " and '. So TeX adopts a convention: type the opening quote with a backtick (grave accent) and the closing quote with an apostrophe (single quote). TeX reads these not as literal characters but as instructions for direction.

For a single quote, use one backtick to open and one apostrophe to close. For a double quote, use two backticks to open and two apostrophes to close (you do not use a dedicated double-quote key at all). Typeset, these become the curly marks ‘ ’ and “ ”.

`Single' quotes, and ``double'' quotes.

``I'm just going out,'' she said.

Note in the second line that an apostrophe inside a word (the contraction “I’m”) is just a single apostrophe. It renders as the same glyph ’ as a closing single quote, which reads correctly in context. If you swap opening and closing, you get reversed marks like ’ ‘ — so always begin an opening quote on the backtick side.

The straight-quote mistake

The most frequent slip is to type the **double-quote key "** out of word-processor habit. LaTeX can only treat it as a closing quote (or a plain straight mark), so you get the same upright glyph at both ends. In a paper or book, that shape looks amateurish.

Likewise, typing an apostrophe ' where you meant an opening single quote is wrong: LaTeX only reads the apostrophe as a closing direction, so the mark points the wrong way. The rule is simple — always begin an opening quote on the backtick side. The table below summarizes right and wrong.

The conversion from raw backticks and apostrophes into curly quotes is implemented as ligatures in the text fonts, so in ordinary Western documents it works with no package loaded. When you genuinely need an upright mark, dedicated commands exist: \textquotesingle (straight single quote) and \textquotedbl (straight double quote).

Nested quotes

When a quotation contains another quotation, English convention puts double quotes outside and single quotes inside (US style; UK style is the reverse — single outside, double inside). If you simply butt the marks together, the three apostrophes of the inner closing ’ and the outer closing ” crowd one another and read poorly. Separate them with a thin space, \thinspace.

``Her answer was `never'\thinspace'' he reported.

This manual spacing is easy to get wrong, and the inside/outside pairing changes when the document language changes. To have nesting and spacing handled correctly and automatically, reach for csquotes, described next.

csquotes and \enquote

The **csquotes package lets you write quotes by meaning rather than by glyph. Its central command, \enquote{…}, supplies the surrounding marks automatically and picks the marks appropriate to the document language**: “ ” for English, „ “ for German, « » for French, and so on. Used together with babel or polyglossia and the autostyle option, the quotation style follows along as the language switches.

Nesting is automatic too. Nest one \enquote{…} inside another and it toggles between the outer and inner marks for you, spacing them correctly. And when you want inner marks from the outset, the starred form **\enquote*{…}** skips straight to the inner level.

\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[autostyle=true]{csquotes}
% ...
\enquote{She said \enquote*{never} and left.}

In English this typesets as “She said ‘never’ and left.” — outer double quotes and inner single quotes, chosen for you. The raw backtick-and-apostrophe convention is still valid and widely used, but for multilingual documents or heavy nesting, \enquote is more robust and harder to get wrong — the modern recommendation.

Dashes (hyphen, en, em, minus)

There are four horizontal strokes of different lengths, each with its own job, and you choose between them by how many hyphens you type. A hyphen - is one; the en dash – is two in a row, --; the em dash — is three in a row, ---. The mathematical minus sign is a different character entirely, produced in math mode as $-$.

See pages 5--10. A break---an aside---fits here.
The value is $-3$, a well-known fact.

The matching commands are \textendash (= --) and \textemdash (= ---). Using a single hyphen for a range (5-10), or a text hyphen for a minus (-3), is — alongside straight quotes — among the most common mistakes. Use an en dash for ranges, and always set a negative or an operator minus in math mode.

Quotes in other languages

Quotation style varies a lot by language. German uses low-opening, high-closing marks „ “; French uses double angle marks (guillemets) « ». Babel’s German extension provides commands and shorthands such as \glqq and \grqq, and French uses guillemets. Rather than memorize per-language commands, though, it is more reliable to let csquotes carry the meaning via \enquote and leave the style to babel/polyglossia.

Japanese is different. Japanese quotation uses corner brackets 「」 and double corner brackets 『』; the Western quotes and backtick convention above do not apply. Japanese brackets and punctuation are covered on the “Punctuation & brackets” page. In a mixed Japanese–Western document, use Western quotes (or \enquote) only in the Western passages and type the corner brackets directly in the Japanese ones.