Output of double angle quotation marks

darkstar69
Hi there,

I'm having problems regarding the correct output of left and right-pointing double angle quotation marks, i.e. « and », when, depending on which direction they're pointing, there is a blank space before or behind them. While they're displayed correctly in Zotero, there will be a symbol representing an empty box added before, resp. after the quotation mark when output in MS Word. The field type (e.g. author, title etc.) does not matter.

Example phrase:

Test « test » test.

The following example phrase is working however:

Test «a test» test.

Strangely, both example phrases will be output the wrong way (= with added empty box symbols), when the quotation marks are being reversed, like:

Test »a test« test.

I tried various styles and inserting unicode characters into Zotero, but to no avail. I'm on a German Windows machine. Any ideas are highly appreciated. Thank you.

Regards
  • adamsmith
    The French guillemets are always preceded by a non-breaking space. Could it be that you're just seeing that and that either your font in Word doesn't render that or that you're just seeing a placeholder character that will go away on syncing?

    Why are you using angle brackets within a title? That seems problematic to me -- if you want to use double angle brackets as primary or internal quotation marks, you should set the citation style up to do that but still input regular quotes for more versatility.
  • darkstar69
    Hello and thanks for the quick reply. It might be the non-breaking space that I'm seeing, but, like you say, if that's really the case, it's not being rendered correctly and I wonder why this would be.... Usually I'm using Times New Roman in Word, but other fonts show the same results. In MS Gothic it's a tiny black square instead of an "empty box" symbol though. The wrong character appears after «, but before » in my first and third example phrase.

    What do you mean by "go away on syncing"?

    To be honest, I'm using the angle brackets only very rarely, maybe in two or three cases. The affected sources use those brackets in their title (yes, they are French) and I want to present them in their original way within my bibliography.
  • adamsmith
    sorry, I meant 'go away in printing'. I had just been thinking about something else.
  • darkstar69
    ok, unfortunitely, the wrong characters will be printed as well.
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