Quotation Marks Not Parsed Correctly

[jonathan-gruber-jg]

Quotation marks in a Markdown file are not always parsed correctly.

Suppose that the file test.md has the contents

"A B"

'A B'

and the file test.tex has the contents

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{markdown}

\begin{document}
\markdownInput{test.md}
\end{document}

.

Observed behavior

The Markdown implementation Discount parses test.md as the HTML

<p>&ldquo;A B&rdquo;</p>

<p>&lsquo;A B&rsquo;</p>

while the Markdown implementation MD4C parses test.md as the HTML

<p>&quot;A B&quot;</p>

<p>&apos;A B&apos;</p>

. However, when we typeset test.tex, then test.md is effectively parsed as the HTML

<p>&rdquo;A B&rdquo;</p>

<p>&rsquo;A B&rsquo;</p>

or apparently as the LaTeX

\textquotedblright{}A B\textquotedblright{}

\textquoteright{}A B\textquoteright{}

.

Expected behavior

I would have expected for test.md to be parsed as one of the possibilities below:

1. The HTML

   <p>&ldquo;A B&rdquo;</p>
   
   <p>&lsquo;A B&rsquo;</p>

   and LaTeX

   \textquotedblleft{}A B\textquotedblright{}
   
   \textquoteleft{}A B\textquoteright{}

   , or

2. The HTML

   <p>&quot;A B&quot;</p>
   
   <p>&apos;A B&apos;</p>

   and the LaTeX

   \textquotedbl{}A B\textquotedbl
   
   \textquotesingle{}A B\textquotesingle

   .

System information

TeX distribution: TeX Live 2025.
TeX version: 3.141592653
LuaTeX version: 1.22.0
XeTeX version: 3.141592653-2.6-0.999997
"markdown" package version: 3.13.0-0-gdd212d58
Operating system: Arch Linux with kernel version 6.18.7-arch1-1

[Witiko]

This is one of TeX's idiosyncrasies: ' typesets ’ and '' or " typesets as ” in regular text. To typeset the corresponding left quotation marks, you'd type ` for ‘ and `` for “. In Markdown, this is not very practical, since having more than one left quotation mark in a paragraph will produce code spans and you will need to escape your backticks like so: \` and \`\`. Therefore, you may be better off writing the Unicode characters in your Markdown sources directly.

In any case, this behavior is expected. The Markdown Package simply passes ordinary characters through to TeX and does not alter how they are mapped to font characters by TeX. Quotation handling is therefore determined entirely by your (La)TeX setup, typically via LuaTeX and fontspec.