#272TeX Quotes

TEX is a typesetting language developed by Donald Knuth. It takes source text together with a few typesetting instructions and produces, one hopes, a beautiful document. Beautiful documents use “ and ” to delimit quotations, rather than the mundane " which is what is provided by most keyboards. Keyboards typically do not have an oriented double-quote, but they do have a left-single-quote ` and a right-single-quote '. Check your keyboard now to locate the left-single-quote key ` (sometimes called the “backquote key”) and the right-single-quote key ' (sometimes called the “apostrophe” or just “quote”). Be careful not to confuse the left-single-quote ` with the “backslash” key \. TEX lets the user type two left-single-quotes `` to create a left-double-quote “ and two right-single-quotes '' to create a right-double-quote ”. Most typists, however, are accustomed to delimiting their quotations with the un-oriented double-quote ".

If the source contained

"To be or not to be," quoth the bard, "that is the question."

then the typeset document produced by TEX would not contain the desired form:

“To be or not to be,” quoth the bard, “that is the question.”

"To be or not to be," quoth the Bard, "that
is the question".
The programming contestant replied: "I must disagree.
To `C' or not to `C', that is The Question!"

``To be or not to be,'' quoth the Bard, ``that
is the question''.
The programming contestant replied: ``I must disagree.
To `C' or not to `C', that is The Question!''