Subject: Re: international smart quotes?
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Fri Jul 21 2000 - 17:59:42 CDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "WJCarpenter" <bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG>
To: "AbiWord Mailing List" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: smart quote algorithm
| koh> We can probably use all characters defined as 'Punctuation' in
| koh> the Unicode standard. These are marked as 'Po', e.g.:
|
| koh> 0021;EXCLAMATION MARK;Po;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
|
| Too bad there is no UT_UCS_ispunct() and friends that we can
| transplant into Abi. The idea of using the character description
| files from <http://www.unicode.org> has a pretty steep overhead,
| though that is really the only way to get it exactly right.
Yes, and this *is* important for a word processor. Though this isn't something
that have to be implemented right away. We can wait till AbiWord 6.0 is finished
...
| koh> | ALPHA Alphabetic characters in the C isalpha() sense, but there are
|
| koh> Almost 50,000 in Unicode ...
|
| Yeah ... my kingdom for a correct UT_UCS_isalpha() ... :-)
|
| koh> For minutes and feet, U+2032 should really be used (yes, nobody
| koh> (will) use them (if AbiWord doesn't make them easy to
| koh> use/insert!)).
|
| Nobody will use them even if they are easy to insert.
Well, *almost* nobody. Some people care about correct typography (though these
people may be using LaTeX!). But of course I agree, most people won't use them.
Though I think *all* Unicode characters should be easy to insert. There should
be a dialog box (a modified 'Insert Symbols'), where you can see a list of all
characters, along with their names, e.g. 'Latin Capital Letter S with Acute'
(these descriptions are part of the Unicode database) (the Windows program
'Arjan Mels' Font Viewer' has a very nice interface for this). Ideally, this
should be searchable, so if I want to insert an ellipsis characters (similar to
three periods: ...), I can search for 'ellipsis'. I can wait for AW 6.0 for this
feature too ... (sorry, my lack of C++ knowledge makes me unable to implement
this myself :( )
| Almost
| everybody, especially the church secretary, types into a word
| processor with visuals in mind rather than structure. As long as the
| thing looks like what they expect, they're happy with overloading
| glyphs.
Yes. And that's OK for them. But AbiWord should also contain features for "power
users". You should be able to get professional output form AbiWord.
| koh> Well, you can turn of smart quotes. In word, you can use 'Undo'
| koh> to undo conversion of a single quote.
|
| I wasn't aware of that. Since the smart quote conversion was almost
| certainly going to have change records in Abi, this should work there,
| too.
Great!
-- Karl Ove Hufthammer
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