Formatting Information

Direct speech and short quotes within a sentence ‘like this’ are done with simple quotation marks as described in § 1.8 above. Sometimes, however, you may want longer quotations set as a separate paragraph. Typically these are indented from the surrounding text. LATEX has two environments for doing this.

Such quotations are often set in a smaller size of type, although this is not the default, but you can use one of the size commands like \small (see § 6.2.5 below) as shown in the example.

\begin{quotation}\small\noindent
At the turn of the century William Davy, a Devonshire 
parson, finding errors in the first edition of his 
\citetitle{davy}, asked for a new edition to be printed. 
His publisher refused and Davy purchased a press, type, 
and paper. He harnessed his gardener to the press and 
apprenticed his housemaid to the typesetting. After 
twelve years' work, a new edition of fourteen sets of 
twenty-six volumes was issued---which surely indicates 
that, when typomania is coupled with religious fervour, 
anything up to a miracle may be 
achieved.\hfill\textcite[p.76]{ryder}
\end{quotation}

The inclusion of a bibliographic citation at the end is optional but commonplace, especially in academic or research documents where it may be compulsory because of the need to cite everything you quote. It’s also possible in LATEX for this to be tucked into the space at the end of the last line of the quotation, if there is room (if it’s too long, or not predictable [like a web page], it should go on a line by itself, as it does in the web version of this document).

The quotation environment sets the whole block of text indented, and each paragraph of it also has its own indentation on the first line, even the first paragraph. This is rather unconventional as a default, so it is common to add a \noindent command at the start of the quotation so that the first paragraph does not get indented (others still will).