Subject: dogfood feedback -- Smart Quotes
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 22:28:50 CST
Bill,
Just a quick note with feedback on your smart quotes implementation. For
the most part, the feature Just Works ... so much so that I didn't notice it
was there and doing its thing.
However, a few annoyances did crop up -- all of which can be seen by typing
in contractions.
1. Undo granularity wrong.
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Any auto-replace operation should be undoable, in case you don't like the
results. To make this work, the replacement operation itself should be a
separate undo step.
2. Messes up word boundaries for contractions.
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I put logic in there long ago so that we could properly pass contractions to
the spell engine for validation. With smart quotes turned on, they "aren't"
working any more. Try it. :-)
3. Something's goofy on export.
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Make a new document. Type in your favorite contraction with Smart Quotes
on. The single-quote gets replaced with a curly glyph (in Times New Roman).
Save and reload the document. Now you get a different glyph (still TNR, but
straighter). Huh?
I suspect that this may be something subtle about the encoding used to store
the contents of our file format. If we explicitly tell expat
encoding="ISO-8859-1", then any embedded Unicode characters outside that
range need to be mangled properly. IIRC, Jeff put logic in long ago to do
so -- did someone change / break this recently?
Paul
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