Subject: Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 16 2000 - 20:18:48 CDT
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On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
> From: "sam th" <sam@uchicago.edu>
>
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> | On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, WJCarpenter wrote:
> |
> | > The reason I didn't put it on the View tab is that creation of smart
> | > quotes on the fly isn't just presentation. It actually will change
> | > ASCII quotes to Unicode curly quotes in the document itself.
> |
> | Really? That's too bad. I was hoping that you were going to implement it
> | in remapGlyphs style, so that Smart Quotes existed only in memory, and
> | were remapped on the fly when the document was loaded. They could even be
> | printed as smart quotes. As I see it, this would have several advantages:
>
> I see several disadvantages. The quotes are part of the *content* of the
> document. It seems like too much trouble to convert to real quotes when saving
> (to .abw, HTML, latex &c.), printing, when copying and in all other situations
> where we have to output the text.
HTML is an *excellent* example of a place where we should not use smart
quotes. Most browsers (except IE) currently display them badly.
>
> Quotes shouldn't always be converted into smart quotes. One example the inch
> character. If you have smart quotes disabled, it would look very strange if
> inches (e.g. 3.5") suddenly became quote marks (when you turned on smart
> quotes/used a different machine). As I said, the quote marks are *content*, not
> presentation (and in English, proper (curly) quote marks *should* be used).
>
The inch vs quote issue will happen no matter what way this is
implemented.
> | 1) Backwards compatibility. Anyone with 0.7.5 (for example) could still
> | open the document without problems.
>
> I don't think backwards compatibility is very important now/pre-1.0. There are
> several features that won't be backwards compatible, e.g. lists. And I doubt
> many people will *voluntarily* use 0.7.5 when newer and better versions are
> available.
I agree that such users are unlikely, but there's a reason that people
worry about Netscape 2.0 compatibility. People dislike change. Also, if
things are transparently backwards-compatible, in most cases this will
mean we implemented them right.
>
> | 2) Font compatibility. Say you have a platform without a font that
> | includes smart quotes. AbiWord could still easily run on that.
>
> I presume you mean *doesn't* include smart quotes. Well, most platforms should
> support them. All platforms are starting to have basic Unicode support, and the
> smart quotes characters are available in the Windows and Mac character sets.
>
Currently Linux (for example) has abysmal Unicode font support (like most
of its font support). AbiWord should work perfectly on any platform, not
just ones with certain fonts.
> | 3) (Related to 2) Different people would not have to know about other's
> | preferences. If you wnated to use smart quotes, and you sent a document
> | to me, I wouldn't even be able to tell what your settings were. If I used
> | Smart Quotes, they would appear just as I wanted them. If I didn't, I
> | would never see them, just regular ASCII quotes.
>
> This is *bad*. The quotes are part of the content. If suddenly all my quotes
> were turned into the inch character, I wouldn't like it. (Just like I would
> really dislike having my en-dashes turned into hyphens!)
>
Sorry, but here I have to disagree. The formatting of your quotes is
presentation, not content. And presentation should be decided by the
user. If I want quotes to look a certain way, that's tough for you. On
my computer, they look the way I want.
> | 4) Makes life easier for other apps. If another app wants to use .abw
> | files, they don't have to think about Smart Quotes.
>
> If " were turned into real quotes, they wouldn't have think about them either.
> Curly quotes are just like any other Unicode character.
>
AbiWord was released in August of 98. We first dealt with Smart Quotes
reasonably this month. Nuf said.
> BTW, smart quotes should also be language dependant. E.g., when writing in
> french, '« ' and ' »' should be used. For this to work, it must be possible to
> choose which language a document, and parts of a document is written in. This
> needs to be implemented sometime anyway, because of the spell checker. In the
> file format, language (changes) can be marked-up with xml:lang="language-code".
This is a good idea, but how do you tell what language something is
written in?
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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