xelatex fails because straight quote marks transformed to angle quotes

[vlotorev]

Problem

My rst file contains quoted "text". After upgrading from 1.5.3 to 1.6.2 PDF builds started failing.
Why sphinx replaces rst text, if I'd like to use angle quotes, I'd use them right in rst.
(I can see discussion in PR#3527, but don't understand a word in that magic).

Clean project project with straight quotes is compiling ok.
My project uses custom preamble, so it might be a problem with it but I'm not a Tex expert.

Error logs / results

Compilation ends with errors like:

Package Fancyhdr Warning: \fancyfoot's `E' option without twoside option is use
less on input line 115.

[2]
Глава 2.
! Extra \endgroup.
\endgroup

Environment info

• OS: CentOS 6.2,
• Python version: 2.7
• Sphinx version: 1.6.2
• texlive/2015

[jfbu]

The #3527 which you quote has been obsoleted by a merge of #3666 at Sphinx 1.6.1.

You can turn off "smart quotes" currently by adding a docutils.conf file at same level as conf.py and with contents

[parsers]
smart_quotes: no

I hope this helps you.

The Fancyhdr warning is something else, probably oneside option is used. This is known problem but innocuous warning.

For further help, minimal project would be helpful.

Trying with "спасибо", language = 'ru' and latex_engine = 'xelatex' and

latex_elements = {
     #
    'preamble': r'''
\setmainfont{FreeSerif}
\setsansfont{FreeSans}
\setmonofont{FreeMono}
''',
}

I got no issue. Perhaps you use some special xetex set-up.

[vlotorev]

You can turn off "smart quotes" currently by adding a docutils.conf file at same level as conf.py and with contents

Great, thanks for advice. I'm developing an extention that is used in multiple doc projects. Making all these projects to create additional files would be unexpected burden for doc project maintainers. Is it possible to set this option from an extention?

[jfbu]

You can add this to your extension:

from docutils.utils import smartquotes
import sphinx.util.smartypants
smartquotes.smartchars.quotes = {}

at least with Sphinx 1.6.2 and Docutils 0.13.1 this should have effect to disable smart quotes. You should do that conditionally on Sphinx version. Indeed in the future sphinx.util.smartypants will be removed as it is used only as a patch for Docutils < 0.14.

I tested it briefly but do not at all recommend (it affects html target too). it would be much more valuable to understand exactly what is your problem with xelatex and quotes. At the present time I do not know your problem.

With the above "спасибо" in reST file becomes "спасибо" in latex file, which is rendered by xelatex in PDF usually by curly quotes; at least this is how it looks in my testing with FreeSerif.

This is quite bad.

[tk0miya]

In 1.6.6, we introduce a new option smartquotes to disable the feature.
http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/config.html#confval-smartquotes

Thanks,

[vlotorev]

Great, thanks.