Argthtjtr

I want to use both french quotes and german quotes in my text. French quotes will be for "actual quoting", while the german quotes will be used for accentuation or irony.

Minimal example:

documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}%Schriftgröße

usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 

usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

usepackage[ngerman]{babel}%Veröffentlichungssprache



begin{document}



Das Buch mit dem Titel flqq uninteressanter Titelfrqq{} hat einen glqq interessanten Titelgrqq.



The book with the title flqq uninteresting titlefrqq{} has an glqq interesting titlegrqq.



end{document}

Result:

Das Buch mit dem Titel «uninteressanter Titel» hat einen „interessanten

Titel“.

The book with the title «uninteresting title» has an „interesting title“.

However in german french quotes are used reversed, so it should be

Das Buch mit dem Titel »uninteressanter Titel« hat einen „interessanten

Titel“.

The book with the title »uninteresting title« has an „interesting title“.

Is there a (beginner friendly) way to automatically create "german style french quotes"? Maybe depending on the language setting for babel?
Or should I just switch positions of flqq and frqq?

I found this page online, which seems to suggest that it is possible.

From the site:

« Frankreich »  og Frankreichfg

«Schweiz»   frqq Schweizflqq

»Deutschland«   flqq Deutschlandfrqq

»Österreich«    flqq {"O}sterreichfrqq

As far as I can see flqq and frqq are defined in babel.def as

ProvideTextCommandDefault{flqq}{%

  textormath{guillemotleft}{mbox{guillemotleft}}}

ProvideTextCommandDefault{frqq}{%

  textormath{guillemotright}{mbox{guillemotright}}}

At least the German and French babel modules do not change those definitions and it would be extremely confusing if they did. But they add their own shorthands or short macro names for those commands.

That means that to get

»uninteressanter Titel«

you would normally have to type

frqq uninteressanter Titelflqq{}

Of course it would be possible to reverse the definitions of flqq and frqq, but I would advise against that. Instead I suggest you define semantically meaningful macros for your two quote styles and use those.

For example

documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}

usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 

usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

usepackage{lmodern}

usepackage[ngerman]{babel}



newcommand*{actualquote}[1]{frqq #1flqq{}}

newcommand*{scarequote}[1]{glqq #1grqq{}}



begin{document}

Das Buch mit dem Titel actualquote{uninteressanter Titel} hat

einen scarequote{interessanten Titel}.



The book with the title actualquote{uninteresting title} has

an scarequote{interesting title}.

end{document}

Ulrike Fischer suggested csquotes in the comments and that is an extremely good idea. The main idea of csquotes is to provide a universal quotation command, whose output changes according to the surrounding language settings. As far as I can see, csquotes usually assumes that you use one citation style per language and does not support two different styles with two different commands out of the box.

You could try something like

documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}

usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 

usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

usepackage{lmodern}

usepackage[english,ngerman]{babel}

usepackage[autostyle,german=guillemets]{csquotes}



newcommand*{actualquote}{enquote}

newcommand*{scarequote}[1]{%

  setquotestyle{german/quotes}%

  enquote{#1}%

  setquotestyle*}



begin{document}

Das Buch mit dem Titel actualquote{uninteressanter Titel} hat

einen scarequote{interessanten Titel}.



selectlanguage{english}

The book with the title actualquote{uninteresting title} has

an scarequote{interesting title}.

end{document}

That gives you language-dependent quotation marks for actualquote/enquote and fixed quotation marks for scarequote. The quotation style for German marks is set to give guillemets of the form »uninteressanter Titel« (»Möwchen«, wie Wikipedia erwähnt).