quotation marks

Normally, LaTeX source files use the pairs of characters `` and '' to represent open and close quotation marks. A LaTeX-aware text editor such as emacs will insert these characters automatically when " is typed.

quotation mark options in sffms

Sffms includes two options for changing quotation mark style, which are explained in the documentation. Their main purpose is to handle legacy quotation marks in text files. The smart option will smarten dumb quotes, and is most useful in conjunction with the nonsubmission option. The dumb option will dumb down LaTeX quotes, and is most useful in a file with mixed LaTeX and dumb quotes.

There's a txt2latex perl script available from CTAN at https://www.ctan.org/pkg/txt2latex that will convert quotes in the source text permanently, but it's not very smart about it and will require some hand-editing after the fact.

Note that none of these approaches will handle "smart quotes" of the traditional non-ascii sort. Be sure to convert legacy files to plain text before sending them through LaTeX.