Double Quotes in LaTeX
LaTeX is a typesetting system that you can use to produce high quality documents. I’m starting to use it now to write my dissertation. It has a bit of a learning curve, but I’m thinking it will probably save me a lot of pain and anguish in the long run in writing my dissertation. I’ll probably be writing more posts about it as I gain familiarity and understand best practices, but for now I want to write a simple tip that will help you.
If you want to write double quotes in LaTeX, you need to use two back quote characters for the left quotation mark and then two hyphens for the right quotation mark. I’m guessing this is because the regular double-quotation mark is used as a reserved character. Or maybe because LaTeX wants you to be very explicit about what you want to be displayed, rather than trying to guess for you (as MS Word does). This can be a pro or a con, depending on how you look at it.
``phrase goes here''