Quotation marks rendering as TeX ligatures

[pascalsiemsen]

Bug description

If using quatation marks in a quarto document and rendering to pdf, the quotation marks come out as the latex quotation marks and not the curly ones.

This is not the case when converting the document to markdown and running pandoc.

pandoc -f markdown -t pdf -o qu.pdf  test_quotation_marks_md.md 

I suppose it has something to do with the "smart" extension?

https://pandoc.org/chunkedhtml-demo/7.1-typography.html

Steps to reproduce

Quarto document:

---
title: "Test"
format: pdf
---

## Quarto


Test the quotation "marks" here and 'here'. 

and press render in Rstudio.

Expected behavior

qu.pdf

Actual behavior

test_quotation_marks.pdf

Your environment

• IDE: Rstudio 2023.06.1.524-1
• Endeavour OS

Quarto check output

[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.1.1: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.55.0: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.3.450
      Path: /opt/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.11.3
      Path: /usr/bin/python3
      Jupyter: 5.3.1
      Kernels: python3

(-) Checking Jupyter engine render....[IPKernelApp] WARNING | debugpy_stream undefined, debugging will not be enabled
[✓] Checking Jupyter engine render....OK

[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.3.1
      Path: /usr/lib64/R
      LibPaths:
        - /home/pascal/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3
        - /usr/lib/R/library
      knitr: 1.42
      rmarkdown: 2.21

[✓] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

[cderv]

This is indeed related to the smart extension. Usually with Quarto you can pass extension to format string like this

---
title: "Test"
format: latex-smart
---

## Quarto


Test the quotation "marks" here and 'here'.

However, it does not work with format: pdf-latex - probably because it really means --to latex for Pandoc and then we convert to pdf ourself, so we need to extract extensions and append to latex

@dragonstyle do you know if we already handle this ?

[dragonstyle]

I'm not reproducing this issue using Quarto 1.4.* or Quarto 1.3.450 - LaTeX quotes are being properly rendered (as attached). The +smart extension is default enabled in pandoc for latex output (which is what it would see when we use to render the latex before we convert that to PDF), so I'm not sure what would explain the difference in our output (and in fact, the rendered PDF shows the typopgraphic characters that should be rendered by LaTeX to curly quotes).

One theory would be the presence or absence of fonts on the system that is rendering the output - perhaps you are using a font which doesn't support typographic glyphs?

test.pdf

[cderv]

Indeed I can't reproduce either, or I misunderstood in the first place. Sorry.

What is relevant in my previous comment is that we have probably no way to pass -smart Pandoc extension when rendering to PDF with quarto. 🤔 Maybe something we should improve and allow

[pascalsiemsen]

Thanks for the comments. I still don't know where the problem lies. But I found out that it is related to using xelatex. Using pdflatex works fine. The font is "IBM Plex Serif".

Works:

---
title: "Fonts in Quarto"
format:
  pdf:
    pdf-engine: pdflatex
    include-in-header:
      - text: |
          \usepackage{plex-serif}
---

## Quarto

Quarto enables you to weave together content and executable code into a finished "document". 

Does not work:

---
title: "Fonts in Quarto"
format: pdf
pdf-engine: xelatex
mainfont: "IBM Plex Serif"
---

## Quarto

Quarto enables you to weave together content and executable code into a finished "document". 

[cderv]

Can you run with keep-tex: true and look into the tex content produced for the quotes ?

[pascalsiemsen]

The output in the tex file is ``document''.

I've installed quarto on a different laptop and used tintytex (quarto install tinytex) instead of the local texlive install (on Arch Linux) and the quotes work under xelatex. Hence, it is something with my installation and I will look into that.

[pascalsiemsen]

Found the culprit:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/690449/suddenly-and-is-not-translated-to-curly-quotes-and-en-dash

Arch reorganised the texlive package and the package texlive-xetex needs to be installed (pacman -S texlive-xetex). I also installed texlive-most and some language packages and the conversion is now workin.