Hello!

My name is Martin and I use org-mode every day. This is my first message to
the mailing list, and I wanted to ask if somebody could help me with a
problem I encountered when exporting a document with nested smart quotes.

I have submitted the same question
<https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/35942/nested-smart-quotes-in-org-mode>
to the emacs Stack Exchange, and someone suggested there to send a message
to this list. I assume many people here reads their email inside emacs, and
since this email has embedded images, you might see it better formatted in
SO.

I have found that the smart-quotes option of org-mode does not export
properly the quotes when they are nested (single quotes inside double
quotes), but only when they coincide at the start or the end of the quote.

Maybe the problem will be clearer with an example:

#+TITLE: Smart quotes example
#+OPTIONS: toc:nil ':t
#+LANGUAGE: en
#+LATEX_CLASS: book
She said to me: "Rick screamed, 'let's go together'"

This gets exported to TeX as:

She said to me: ``Rick screamed, `let's go together'''

Which gets rendered as PDF as:

[image: The order of the closing quotes is wrong]
<https://i.stack.imgur.com/7QHh7.png>

The order of the closing quotes gets reversed, it first closes the outside
double quotes and then the nested single quote.

I have tried leaving a space between them, but that is arguably worse

Org:

She said to me: "Rick screamed, 'let's go together' "

TeX:

She said to me: ``Rick screamed, `let's go together' "

PDF:

[image: Internal quotes are ok, closing double quote is wrong]
<https://i.stack.imgur.com/cqbzj.png>

In this case, the internal single quotes are rendered correctly, but the
closing quote is not converted into its "smart" version.

If the nested quotes are in such a way that there are other characters
between the quotes, that is they are not together at the start or the end
of the quote, they get rendered correctly.

Thanks in advance


Martin

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