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.