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