From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 13:58:34 EDT
At 6:24 PM +0100 8/14/02, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>I had an idea about the smart quotes. The smartquote problem is
>algorithmically identical to the shaping of Arabic glyphs.
I guess it is...
>Consequently the internal shaper (in HEAD) could be used to shape
>quotes on the fly for the screen/printer without changing the actual
>character in the document.
Which would be VERY cool!
>Further, with very little extra effort, the
>quote translation could be locale- specific, so that, for instance, in
>Czech the opening quote would placed below the base line.
And for CJK, there is a different looking quote, etc. Very nice...
>There are only two small problems with this: (a) the exporters to
>formats in which smart quotes make sense would need to use the
>shaping engine to get the correct version into the document; this
>would be very simple.
As long as it was easy for the exporters (and possibly
importers!), I don't see a problem...
>(b) mechanism is needed for allowing the user
>to force the basic quote shape. If the user never wanted this
>behaviour, they would just turn smart quotes off, there is preference
>of that.
OK, so if the preference for "no smart quotes" is off then
the shaper should ignore that glyph - right?
>The way I though it could be handled in isolated cases is to
>tie a zero-width-non-breaking space to some key, say alt+spacebar,
>and the user could surround such a quote with these spaces, thus
>making it into stand alone one (== the basic form).
YUCH! No user is going to be willing to do this. The
preferences & shaper should just "do the right thing".
Leonard
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@lazerware.com> <http://www.lazerware.com>
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