I would like to get quotation marks like these „...” but when I process my markdown text wih Pandoc, it gives me “...”. It probably boils down to the question how to make Pandoc use locale settings? Here is my command line:
pandoc -o out.pdf -f markdown -t latex in.md
You may want to specify the language for the whole document, so that it not only affects the quotes, but also ligatures, unbreakable spaces, and other locale specifics.
In order to do that, you may specify the lang option. From pandoc's manual:
lang: identifies the main language of the document, using a code according to BCP 47 (e.g. en or en-GB). For some output formats, pandoc will convert it to an appropriate format stored in the additional variables babel-lang, polyglossia-lang (LaTeX) and context-lang (ConTeXt).
Moreover, the same manual states that:
if your LaTeX template or any included header file call for the csquotes package, pandoc will detect this automatically and use \enquote{...} for quoted text.
In my opinion, the best way to ensure quotes localization is thus to add:
---
lang: fr-FR
header-includes:
- \usepackage{csquotes}
---
Or even better, to edit the pandoc default template
pandoc -D latex > ~/.pandoc/templates/default.latex
and permanently add \usepackage{csquotes} to it.