The above mentioned workaround improves the behavior for German quotes (by a lot) but does not resolve the issues completely.

When pressing ", it inserts "`▂' (with ▂ being the cursor) instead of "`▂"'. When finishing the quote and pressing " again, it correctly inserts "' at the end, but leaves the additional ' from before, i.e., typing "foo" gives me "`foo"'▂' instead of "`foo"'▂.

For better reproducibility, here is my tex-code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{ngerman}
\begin{document}
"`foo"'
\end{document}

And here the value I have set TeX-quote-language-alist to:

'(("ngerman" "\"`" "\"'" nil) ("german" "\"`" "\"'" nil))

Hi, I just want to state that this is still an issue.

Since TeX-insert-quote provides its own behaviours, the easiest would be to disable smartparens handling of quotes if you prefer the auctex way.

(sp-local-pair 'latex-mode "`" nil :actions nil)
(sp-local-pair 'latex-mode "\"" nil :actions nil)
(sp-local-pair 'latex-mode "``" nil :actions nil)

I'm sure it could be made to work together, for example by dynamically adding pairs based on TeX-quote-language, then if you insert the opening smartparens would insert the ending. But I guess this is also somehow implemented in auctex itself.

To be completely honest, I don't really use tex anymore so this is not very high priority for me. Plus I don't understand how auctex handles this and what users expect, so it's really hard to create a good solution. We can brainstorm some ideas and if there is consensus something can be implemented. But a safe way would be to defer the quote handling to auctex.

Hi!

Thanks for your reply. I have played around a bit, and I sincerely do not understand what is going on.

Using

(sp-local-pair '(tex-mode plain-tex-mode latex-mode LaTeX-mode) "``" nil :actions nil)

I can normally write a single double quote " in the comments, but NOT in the
rest of the document. For example, typing " would insert a triple of ```
I can not see how smartparens distinguishes comments from non-comments. It could
be that AucTeX mode is doing some magic behind the scenes, but well.

Then, further deactivating

(sp-local-tag '(tex-mode plain-tex-mode latex-mode LaTeX-mode) "\"" nil nil :actions nil)

doesn't really change things (which is a further indication that we are
observing a weird interaction with AucTeX).

Finally, deactivating

(sp-local-pair '(tex-mode plain-tex-mode latex-mode LaTeX-mode) "`" nil :actions nil)

leads to classic AucTeX behavior: In LaTeX comments, insertion is unchanged. In
the document (non-comments), a single ` or ' are inserted without further
changes. A double quote " is changed to a double `` quote at the beginning of
a word, and a double '' (two ' quotes) at the end of a word, as expected (only the insertion
has to be manual, and not automatic like with smartparens)

So in the end, I think it is probably best to deactivate all three quotes in smartparens-mode, as you suggested (but use all four modes like in this comment). I can create a PR, if you like.

Finally, I do not understand what this statement does in smartparens-latex.el:

  (sp-local-tag "\"" "``" "''" :actions '(wrap))

Should we also remove it?

Yea, tags no longer exist