14.2 Inserting Quote Characters

As explained in the early section on general Texinfo input conventions (see section General Syntactic Conventions), Texinfo source files use the ASCII character ` (96 decimal) to produce a left quote (`), and ASCII ' (39 decimal) to produce a right quote ('). Doubling these input characters (`` and '') produces double quotes (“ and ”). These are the conventions used by TeX.

This works all right for text. However, in examples of computer code, readers are especially likely to cut and paste the text verbatim—and, unfortunately, some document viewers will mangle these characters. (The free PDF reader xpdf works fine, but other PDF readers, both free and nonfree, have problems.)

If this is a concern for your document, Texinfo provides two special settings via @set:

@set txicodequoteundirected

causes the output for the ' character to be the undirected single quote, like this: '.

@set txicodequotebacktick

Cause the output for the ` character to be the standalone grave accent, like this: `.

xyza`'bc

If you want these settings for only part of the document, @clear will restore the normal behavior, as in @clear txicodequoteundirected.

These settings affect @code, @example, and @verbatim; they do not affect @samp. (See section Highlighting Commands are Useful.)