From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 00:15:34 EDT
--- Tomas Frydrych <tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net>
wrote:
<snip>
> Sure, we provide an algorithm that works well for
> the most common
> cases; we provide a way of turning the whole thing
> off if the user
> does not like it; we provide a way to stop
> converting a straight
> quotation mark into a curved one in an individual
> case (such as '' for
> inches).
>
> There are three basic scenarios:
>
> (1) the user types a straight quote, we display a
> round one and she likes it.
>
> (2) She eally wants a straight quote. To stop
> displaying a round one
> she will type alt+spacebar, straight quote, and gets
> a straight quote.
When we have editable menus, it would be a cool
optional button to toggle toggle smart quotes on/off
without digging through options.
> (3) the user types a straight quote, gets a round
> quote but really
> wanted a different round quote. In this case she has
> to explicititely
> input the round quote she wants via the keyboard.
>
> Now, (2) is not going to be exessively common,
> except say the
> inches, and it will always require user
> intervention; the only case in
> which this can be avoided is if we do not provide
> any smart quote
> support at all, then all straight quotes will be
> straight. If the quote
> selection is based on the same algorithm as Arabic
> glyph shaping,
> then (3) will mainly happen in the case where the
> round quote
> character code overlaps with an actual letter code
> (say a breathing
> mark), in this case it is more than reasonable to
> expect the user to
> input the actual character, not a straight quotation
> mark.
Actually (3) will be pretty common for European
languages where you often have two kinds of non
straight quotes. I often see >> this << mixed with
,,this'' in German and other languages, and not really
in a consistent way that I could tell. I checked in
the latest Duden style manual and it only mentioned
that there are alternative types of quote marks.
It seemed that an author would prefer one type and use
it for reported speech, and if she wanteded for
instance to quote something as "so called" or jargon
or such they would use the other type.
Maybe there is a system and I just couldn't spot it.
<snip>
Andrew.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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