straight quotes

howelll · January 5, 2018

Is there any way to set a style to use straight quotes? I'm tweaking one of the built-in styles for my own use, and can't figure out what determines the quotation character used. I need to end up with plain text output, so can't use smart quotes.

I see that the quotation character varies by locale (some languages use chevrons). But I don't see where to change that.

adamsmith · January 5, 2018

which style are you modifying? And is this for an otherwise English style? (matters for the syntax to give you; this is possible either way)

howelll · January 6, 2018

I was working with the Chicago Manual of Style (full note) style, but will probably want to do Vancouver as well. Yes, otherwise English (US) and English (UK) locales. Thanks!

adamsmith · January 6, 2018

The general code is

<locale xml:lang="en">
   <terms>
      <term name="open-quote">&quot;</term>
      <term name="close-quote">&quot;</term>
      <term name="open-inner-quote">&apos;</term>
      <term name="close-inner-quote">&apos;</term>
  <terms>
</locale>

Note that both Chicago and Vancouver already have terms sections, so you'd only insert the four middle lines into those.

And just to be sure you're aware: there is no contradiction between plain text and smart quotes. Smart quotes are part of the UTF-8 charset, which is handled by plain text (as opposed to e.g. bold and italics, which isn't). You only couldn't use smart quotes if you really need produce text in ascii, though I'm wondering why that would be the case and that would also cause a whole host of other issues, e.g. with umlauts and accented characters.

howelll · January 7, 2018

Thanks!

Yes, I meant ASCII, not just plain text. I can deal with encoding non-ASCII characters in my own content as I need to. It's just that having the style add non-ASCII characters where they didn't already exist meant that I had to deal with them in every single citation.