Subject: RE: Smart Quotes Issues (was Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item)
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Wed Jul 19 2000 - 20:37:10 CDT
sam> 1) Preferences
sam> How should the user decide whether or not they want Smart Quotes enabled
sam> in their document? There are several possibilities:
sam> a) Options/Preferences dialog (which tab?)
sam> b) Menu item
sam> c) Preferences file
sam> d) Other possibilites?
I don't think this is really much of an issue. The answer is
"consistent with the rest of Abi". Of course, the only problem is
that lots of preference UI isn't built. We don't seriously expect the
church secretary to edit the preferences file, do we?
sam> 2) How should smart quotes work (technical algorithm details)
I have done some thinking on this, but my thinking is not done. I'd
like to present an algorithm in a day or two and get comments. Of
course, anyone with comments bursting out of them can send them
instead of waiting, but before you blurt, be sure to consider "there
are subtle factors".
sam> c) Text - no smart quotes, use regular quotes
sam> d) HTML - no smart quotes (this is *very* important(
How will you save other non-ASCII, non-Latin1 characters in these
formats? I guess anyone who saves a WP document as text pretty much
expects it to suck, so we don't care much there.
For HTML, there are encoding formats for "everything", though we all
know that not all browsers support "everything". You mention this as
very important for HTML, but why? I just tried viewing an exported
Abi document with smart quotes in Netscape 4.61 on Linux (which is
getting sort of ancient). No problem. Is there some other place
where it's a problem?
In any case, arbitrary Unicode characters can show up. If
export-to-HTML needs to be fixed for smart quotes, it probably needs
to be fixed in general for high-valued Unicode. It currently uses
numeric encoding (don't be fooled if you look at the files ... it uses
decimal values whereas XML uses hex).
In even more any case, if someone is using Abi to export to HTML and
smart quotes are a problem, they can just turn them off. I even
contemplate a feature for purging smart quotes from an entire
document, so they could be swept from an MSWord import.
sam> e) AbiWord - here is the controversy. I think that .abw files
sam> should not contain smart quote unicode entites. At least one
sam> person has disagreed. Other opinions?
I would favor a general policy of having the native ABW file format
reflect as closely as possible what is being displayed. (I can't
really articulate why this is better, so consider it a user or IT
department reaction.) So, that is why I am in favor of having the
smart quoting be a process of actually replacing the characters in the
content.
-- 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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