From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 14:12:31 EDT
On Wednesday, August 14, 2002, at 01:24 PM, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> I had an idea about the smart quotes. The smartquote problem is
> algorithmically identical to the shaping of Arabic glyphs.
> 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. 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.
>
> 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. (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. 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). I think that this
> is
> entirely adequate, for the need to do this will be extremely rare
> (remember, we do not change the quote code in the document).
The solution sounds feasible for actually performing the character
remapping to screen. A larger and probably more interesting problem
would be how to identify these smart-glyphs and differentiate between
these and normal ones (the " inch marker, mismatched start/end quote
pairs, ...
Do you have any idea of how to feasibly do this? Might the unicode
website help us?
Dom
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