Interesting historical note. Of course that's TeX input, and the author using it knows that it will be interpreted in TeX's special way and the correct characte

Interesting historical note. Of course that's TeX input, and the author using it knows that it will be interpreted in TeX's special way and the correct characters used in the typeset output. Also, with the current Unicode-aware TeX engines, you can just input the normal Unicode quotation marks. That makes your source easier to read.