Text Formatting ⇒ Strange right-hand apostrophe

[zaba]

Hi guys. I'm a LaTeX newbie (I supposed you guessed it from my subject line) with an annoying problem.

The right-hand apostrophe sometimes turns out correctly and sometimes looks over-sized and enormous. Here's the example:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{covington}
\begin{document}

\begin{example}
\textit{-_{c}sa}~`side' \\
\textit{-:xa}~`to the side' \\
\textit{-_{c}xa}~`above' \\
\textit{-_{c}jita}~`exact location' \\
\textit{–wja}~`place' \\
\end{example}

\end{document}

So, the right apostrophe in the second and last example on the list look perfect, but all the others are misshaped. But it's the same typographical symbol in each case! Also, the words [exact location] are meshed together and are italicized for some crazy reason.

This sort of problem occurs a few times in my text so I'm hopeful that one of you guys can give me a clue about what I'm doing wrong.

You can check out the image

[frabjous]

You should be getting a lot of errors when you try to compile that code. The errors should tell you what's wrong. In particular, you cannot use _ for subscripts in text mode. LaTeX is shifting in and out of math mode to accommodate the _ and , and in math mode, ' is used to mean "prime", and so is rendered straight. (You probably also noticed the letters in the words before them are in italics, since they are assumed to be variables.)

Either actually use math mode for the subscripts (but show where they should end):

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{covington}
\begin{document}

\begin{example}
\textit{-$_{c}$sa}~`side' \\
\textit{-:xa}~`to the side' \\
\textit{-$_{c}$xa}~`above' \\
\textit{-$_{c}$jita}~`exact location' \\
\textit{–wja}~`place' \\
\end{example}

\end{document}

Or use the \textsubscript command from the fixltx2e package instead:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{covington}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}
\begin{document}

\begin{example}
\textit{-\textsubscript{c}sa}~`side' \\
\textit{-:xa}~`to the side' \\
\textit{-\textsubscript{c}xa}~`above' \\
\textit{-\textsubscript{c}jita}~`exact location' \\
\textit{–wja}~`place' \\
\end{example}

\end{document}