Subject: Re: language-based smart quotes
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Fri Jul 21 2000 - 17:59:17 CDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "WJCarpenter" <bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG>
To: "AbiWord Mailing List" <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 6:49 AM
Subject: Re: language-based smart quotes
|koh> Sorry, in Norwegian, «» should be used, but Norwegian keyboard
|koh> doesn't have keys for them. You have to type Alt+0171 and
|koh> Alt+0187 to use them.
|
| Wow, that must be extremely inconvenient. Are Alt+0171 and Alt+0187
| the normal quotes for Norwegians, or are they just used in a formal or
| fancy context (similar to English curly quotes)?
They *should* always be used (though English curly quotes *can* be used too
(it's not "illegal")). But very few people know which quotes should be used, so
" is normally used, except in documents written by programs that support smart
quotes.
Books are of course set by professionals, so they always use proper quotes, «»
(and en-dashes).
People who write magazines doesn't know (or care!) much about typographical
conventions, so they often use closing curly quotes (99s), since the original
documents are normally written in Word.
|koh> Ufortunately, there's also a bug in the Norwegian version of MS
|koh> Word 97, which uses 99quote99 (where 99 is the 99-like curly
|koh> quote) for smart quotes (this is the way Swedish quotation marks
|koh> should be written, not Norwegian). Word 6.0 correctly inserted «
|koh> and ».
|
| Do you mean that for Swedish, the open and close curly quotes both
| look the same and would be what an English writer would consider to be
| closing quotes?
Yes. And in Danish, I *think* the opposite quotes of Norwegian is used: »quote«.
|koh> Yes. Having this [language/LOCALE] on the right click context
|koh> menu would also be nice (perhaps a list of the 3-5 most used
|koh> languages).
|
| For things like this, where there is a long list but you might only be
| using a few, I rather like what recent versions of MSWord do when you
| do font changes. It puts the fonts you've been using at the top of
| the menu so that it is easier to switch back and forth without having
| to scroll a long menu.
Yes, this is nice. Here's my suggestion. We'll keep a "global" list of the
languages most often used (by the user). This will be displayed on the
right-click language list, along with all languages used in the current
document.
I also think there should be a _document language_, the primary language a
document is written in. This is important for exporting to other documents. In
(X)HTML, you should always specify the language the document is written in (to
aid browsers using speech synthesis), and in LaTeX, the language *must* be
specified to avoid funny hyphenation.
-- Karl Ove Hufthammer
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