Easier Quotations in LaTeX with dirtytalk

I found it annoying that in LaTeX one has to type

``hello world''

or even

\glqq{}Hallo Welt\grqq{}

when writing German. I also thought that the computer could do the task of deciding whether double or single quotes shall be used. And—most important—I would like to be able to change the behavior at a later time.

This is why I wrote a package to do that. Here it is: dirtytalk

You can use it to write

Alice said: \say{I found a horrible mistake in \say{your} thesis, Bob!}

and get

Alice said: “I found a horrible mistake in ‘your’ thesis, Bob!”

You can specify any other symbol to be used for opening or closing quotes and for nested ones.

To produce the .sty file, run latex on dirtytalk.ins. After that, you can create the documentation file by running latex or—if you prefer—pdflatex on dirtytalk.dtx

This is the first time I wrote a package so I hope it won’t be too \say{dirty} and would be glad if someone finds it useful. Any comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

Downloads

• dirtytalk.dtx
• dirtytalk.ins
• dirtytalk.pdf