11.2 Inserting Quote Characters

As explained in the early section on general Texinfo input conventions (see General Syntactic Conventions), Texinfo source files use the ASCII character ` (96 decimal) to produce a left quote (‘), and ASCII ' (39 decimal) to produce a right quote (’). Doubling these input characters (`` and '') produces double quotes (“ and ”). These are the conventions used by TeX.

In examples of computer code, however, ` and ' produce typical renderings for these ASCII characters: the backtick character (standalone grave accent) and undirected single quote respectively. In the past, directed glyphs were used by default in TeX output. Texinfo provides these commands to choose between these alternate renderings:

@codequoteundirected on-off

Set to ‘off’ to output the ' character in code environments as the right curly single quote.

@codequotebacktick on-off

Set to ‘off’ to output the ` character in code environments as the left curly single quote.

If you want these settings for only part of the document, @codequote... on will restore the normal behavior, as in @codequoteundirected on.

These settings affect @code, @example, @kbd, @samp, @verb, and @verbatim. See Highlighting Commands are Useful.

Unfortunately, some document viewers will mangle the directed quote characters when copying and pasting. (The free PDF reader xpdf works fine, but other PDF readers, both free and nonfree, have problems.)

This feature can also be controlled by using @set and @clear on the corresponding variables txicodequoteundirected and txicodequotebacktick.