[buttproblem]

I wonder if someone could shed some light on this (from type composition straight and curly quotes):

> Computer sci­en­tists and doc­u­men­ta­tion writ­ers, take note: straight quotes and back­ticks in soft­ware code should nev­er be con­vert­ed to curly quotes. Those marks are, of course, part of the func­tion­al syn­tax of the code and must be re­pro­duced lit­er­al­ly. While fans of LaTeX have of­ten writ­ten me to trum­pet its type­set­ting su­pe­ri­or­i­ty, I’ve nev­er seen any LaTeX-cre­at­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion that’s got­ten this right.

As a LaTeX user (and not a very good one) I'm not too sure what I've been doing wrong.

[ygra]

It's very common to see ”Hello World” in LaTeX-written documents. The problem in my eyes is often that well-meaning people tell others that LaTeX will automagically make your document look good and professional, yet neglect to point out that you still have to know the details to achieve that. Proper quotes, proper usage of non-breaking spaces, proper hyphenation when the default breaks down, etc. are all things you have to consider regardless of the application. LaTeX may have nicer default styles and a few superiour algorithms (e.g. line breaking for justified text), but overall result quality for people without any clue is in my experience not higher than with Word.

[mzs]

If you have been doing this:

  \usepackage{listings}
  \usepackage{textcomp}
  ... upquote=true ...

You have been doing nothing wrong.

[mariusae]

Also make sure you read Eddie Kohler's LaTeX usage notes:

  http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/latex.html