Subject: Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 13:22:56 CDT
On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, WJCarpenter wrote:
> sam> MS Word Smart Quotes are just on the fly character replacement,
> sam> which isn't that clever. If we did it this way, I think it would
> sam> really be 'Smart'.
>
> If by that you mean that MSWord just does the equivalent of
> remapGlyphs but really leaves your original ASCII quote marks in your
> document, then I think you've got it wrong. If that were true, there
> would probably be nobody working on smart quotes for Abi. The main
> source of them today is imports from MSWord, in which they are
> persistent.
>
> If you meant something else, I think I'm missing your point (about
> MSWord), so please elaborate.
I did mean something else. I think that the remapGlyphs stuff does
qulaify as smart (which is why the rot13 trick works). What MSWord does
is just redirect the keypress to the insertCurlyQuoteChar() function
instead of insertBoringQuoteChar() function. With a little logic for
opening and closing quotes, that's basically it.
What we could do is have the glyphs remapped in memory to smart quotes,
but stored in the .abw file as normal quotes. This would have the
benifits I outlined earlier.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam
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