Just a note it might be good to add to Pillar documentation [1] which says... you can make something ""bold"" like that. But I was having trouble getting this to work since the quote marks would just appear in the generated PDF. I found the answer by copy pasting the quote mark from [1] into the Mixed input field of [2] and pressing convert tells me this is UTF-16 code 22. If I type the quote mark " directly into that field, then I get the same result. However if I type the quote mark " into TextMate, then copy that character into [2], it tells me its UTF-16 201C!!! what-the! So I found out how to disable Smart Quotes at [3]. [1] github.com/pillar-markup/pillar-documentation [2] rishida.net/tools/conversion [3] devin.la/blog/disable-smart-quotes-osx-mavericks cheers -ben