# quotation marks

$$X_i = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if the }i\text{th voter will vote "yes"}, \\ 0 & \text{if not}. \end{cases}$$

$$X_i = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if the }i\text{th voter will vote yes''}, \\ 0 & \text{if not}. \end{cases}$$

The standard is supposed to be that writing yes'', within $\TeX$ makes it come out as left quotation marks (looking like "66") on the left and right quotation marks (looking like "99") on the right. That doesn't work with whatever version of mathJax (or whatever it is) is being used here. Putting just a quotation mark on both sides, i.e. "yes" gives us the first example above, where right quoation marks appear both on the right and on the left.

Is there some way to get the proper "66"-"99"

• It seems like the MathJax people would be interested in fixing this. – Dylan Moreland Feb 24 '12 at 4:11

I would imagine this is outside the scope of MathJax, which is designed for interpreting TeX math syntax, and not the rest of its capabilities, such as rendering backticks and apostrophes as curly quotes, multiple hyphens as dashes, tildes as non-breaking spaces, and so on.

If you deeply care about typographically ideal quotation marks, you can insert them directly in your input text using your system’s “Character Map” or “Special Characters” utility, or copy and paste them from an online service like Unicode For You or FileFormat.info’s Unicode character search. However, that’s probably more hassle than it’s worth. If I were you, I’d just tolerate the straight quotes — or, I’d write a script to replace straight quotes with curly ones and run all my answers through it before posting them.

Oh look, there's an online service for this. Here's what it does to your math, straight out of the box:

$$X_i = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if the }i\text{th voter will vote &#8220;yes&#8221;}, &#92; 0 & \text{if not}. \end{cases}$$

So, it eats the line breaks and you'll have to put them back yourself. But apart from that, it looks like it does the job.

Well, it did the job in the preview, at least. I've opened a bug.

• It worked in the preview for me too. Then I save the answer and all I got was the code you see above. Then I deleted the answer. – Michael Hardy Feb 24 '12 at 0:32