If You Use KOMA-Script, Really Do Use KOMA-Script

Jun 12th, 2024

KOMA-Script is Omakase. If you trust the package, you’re in good hands to get consistent output from compiling LaTeX documents. I’ve been using Markus Kohm’s KOMA-Script for most of my life with LaTeX in some way or another because the package’s document classes really nail typical German typesetting requirements, e.g. requirements of DIN letter formats (yes, there is a standard for layout and typesetting of letters!). And the scrbook document class ships with tasteful defaults for book typesetting.

Disable XeLaTeX Character Sequence Mappings for Inverted Question Mark and Inverted Exclamation Mark

Mar 27th, 2024

I spend a couple of hours investigating the XeLaTeX purgatory where character mapping live. I didn’t know what these were before, too, don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it. The observable behavior is the following. Let’s say you start with Markdown with “dumb” quotes like this: … and use a conversion tool like Pandoc or MultiMarkdown to turn it into LaTeX, and you pick German quotation marks (the non-guillemet ones). You’ll see why it’s important for this example to use the German quotation marks. They are different from the curly quotes you know from English texts.