Subject: Re: Smart Quotes Issues (was Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item)
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Wed Jul 19 2000 - 20:15:11 CDT
al> There is no good way to determine this, which is why I think that
al> holding down a certain modifier key should modify the behavior of
al> inserting quotes.
I take it as given that there must be a mechanism to enter any
arbitrary Unicode character value into Abi, whether it's on your
keyboard or not. In that geeky sense, smart quotes are just an
instance of that since the smart quotes are actual Unicode characters
with values in the U+20xx range.
It would certainly be possible to add some UI heuristics to that and
do a "Alt doublequote" means a curly one, but there are two problems.
The easy problem is knowing which way to turn the curls (it's easier
than solving "should I use smart quotes at all here?"). The hard
problem is that it misses the points. The point about smart quotes is
that it happens automatically or at least quasi-automatically. If you
have to remember to do something special every time you want them,
it's a much less useful feature. You might as well say if I'm using a
fr_FR locale, "Alt doublequote" means guillemet. It's a path that
could be gone down but is more generally accomplished via a generic
input thing (which is probably already available on some platforms).
al> I think there should be &doublecurlyquoteright; and etc to
al> indicate curly quotes. If someone wrote the document that way and
al> inserted curly quotes, that should be indicated in the file. If
al> someone else saw it and didn't like the smart quotes, that's what
al> search-and-replace is for.
Today (and for longer than I have been around), smart quotes are
stored in ABW files the same way they get translated out of MSWord
files ... as the appropriate Unicode character. Because ABW files are
XML without an explicit encoding, they are written in the XML hex
encoding form if they're above a certain value. I think it would be a
mistake to introduce proprietary XML named encodings for ABW. For one
thing, expat will not convert them back to single Unicode characters
(unless we hack expat).
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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