I did a quantity of semi-automated LaTeX generation. I always had to pay attention to quotes because of the counter-intuitive way it forced you to use quotes. :-/

I should mention that Microsoft attempted to solve the quotes problem. Predictably, they did it in their own, broken way: 1. the two characters they used were at the time not standard in the character set they used. 2. the 'smarts' in Word to detect which way were right wasn't reliable enough in the first version. So it sorta worked only if you stayed within the MS world.

Wade.