Using AUCTeX, with \documentclass[italian]{article} and babel, when I type quotes i get "< or ">:
\documentclass[italian]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
"<bla">
\end{document}
It doesn't happen if I don't use babel:
\documentclass[italian]{article}
\begin{document}
``bla''
\end{document}
This behavior is actually expected and documented in AUCTeX manual:
5.4.1.2 Style Files for Different Languages
AUCTeX supports style files for several languages. Each style file may modify AUCTeX to better support the language, and will run a language specific hook that will allow you to for example change ispell dictionary, or run code to change the keyboard remapping.
‘italian’
Runs style hook TeX-language-it-hook. Pressing"will insert"<and">depending on context.
If you're not satisfied with this behavior, customize TeX-quote-language-alist with M-x customize-variable RET TeX-quote-language-alist RET:
User Option:
TeX-quote-language-alistUsed for overriding the default language-specific quote insertion behavior. This is an alist where each element is a list consisting of four items. The first item is the name of the language in concern as a string. See the list of supported languages above. The second item is the opening quotation mark. The third item is the closing quotation mark. Opening and closing quotation marks can be specified directly as strings or as functions returning a string. The fourth item is a boolean controlling quote insertion. It should be non-nil if if the special quotes should only be used after inserting a literal
"character first, i.e. on second key press.
Using \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, as suggested by @ChristianHupfer, is also recommended.
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, better use thecsquotespackage – Jan 17 '18 at 18:27csquotesand I usually use it. This time I was in a hurry, I'd loaded just a couple of packages and I didn't expect AUCTeX to do some magic even without it. – Arch Stanton Jan 18 '18 at 10:35