Force straight quotes in font (turn off smart quotes)

Using Pressbooks Custom CSS, Styling, Themes
1

We’re using a monospace font (Courier New) to show programming code in a book and automatically getting smart quotes applied to it (i.e. start and end quotes are angled instead of straight).

Is there a way to stop Pressbooks applying smart quotes to a section of the text, or to add this to the theme as a whole? Our author says that the smart quotes will cause an error if his students copy and paste them.

2

The way many authors do this is to use pre and code tags around the code snippet <pre><code>print("hello")</code></pre>
They add the code directly in the Code editor (as opposed to the Visual editor) in Pressbooks.
A few things to consider:

  • the quotes you enter must already be straight quotes (this may not be the case if content is copied from Word or Google Docs)
  • any literal <, >, or & inside the code must be escaped as &lt;, &gt;, &amp;
  • <pre> doesn’t wrap lines typically, so you may have to add custom CSS to achieve that if desired
  • this should work well for the Webbook and probably the EPUB, it probably would not work for the PDF
3

Thanks! That worked for us :slight_smile: