Subject: international smart quotes?
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Jul 20 2000 - 20:25:19 CDT
As I sort of expected, I'm getting a bit of an education on the use of
quotation marks in non-English writing. (No, no, trust me ... I
actually have crossed the oceans surrounding the US. Heck, I've even
been to Canada a couple of times. :-) Please keep these examples
coming, as I find them quite interesting.
It sounds like there may be a case for having the characters which I
have been describing as curly quotes actually be some other
language-dependent characters. Although the situation still seems a
bit different for English language smart quotes (it's merely a matter
of overcoming geeky aesthetics ... the straight ASCII quotes aren't
officially wrong), it sounds like there might be some service in
helping people in other languages get the quotes they need.
I don't at this point contemplate any particular implementation effort
beyond the simple English-language stuff I've mapped out, but you
never know. I'd be interested in hearing more discussion about the
subject, both example of non-English quoting rules and about how
general the implementation should be. It would probably be relatively
easy to have a language-specific mapping of smart quotes if there
were an infrastructure in Abi for somehow knowing the LOCALE of a
particular piece of text. The mappings could just be hard-wired into
Abi like many of the GUI strings are today.
Is there any non-English situation with quotes where the algorithm
would be dramatically different from the smart quotes algorithm I
sketched last night?
-- 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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