Re: smart quotes, summary of discussion

From: Joaquin Cuenca Abela (e98cuenc@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 07:55:00 EDT

  • Next message: Karl Ove Hufthammer: "Re: smart quotes, summary of discussion"

    --- Karl Ove Hufthammer <lister@huftis.org> wrote:
    > Joaquin Cuenca Abela <e98cuenc@yahoo.com> wrote in
    >
    news:20020820104202.92026.qmail@web14612.mail.yahoo.com:
    >
    > > I came late to the whole discussion about smart
    > > quotes, so maybe all that are old news, but does
    > the
    > > current scheme take in account that in some
    > languages
    > > (like french) the "smart quote" is in fact two
    > > characters (opening quote should be substituted by
    > > opening chevron, non-breaking space) ?
    >
    > No, the *current* scheme doesn't support any other
    > languages than
    > American English.
    >
    > > in french should be quoted as:
    > > example of <<_quoted text_>>
    > >
    > > (the _ is a non-breaking space)
    >
    > Actually, it shouldn't be the U+00A0 full-width
    > non-breaking
    > word space, but a narrower non-breaking space
    > (perhaps a 'thin
    > space' -- I don't remember, but I believe there is
    > some
    > information on this at the Unicode Web site).

    do you mean a quarter of a cadratin? I don't know for
    sure. You should use a thin space before ?! and such
    in frech, but I don't know if it's a thin space or a
    full one after and before the opening and closing
    quotes (after a quick search in the net, it seems that
    it's a full space, but I don't know if the authors of
    the pages that I've consulted are right here).

    > I don't think this will be very difficult to
    > support.
    >
    > > In addition, quoted multi line text should be
    > > typesetted as:
    > >
    > > This is << a multi
    > > << line text quoted
    > > << a la french
    > > << fashion >>
    >
    > This will be much more difficult to implement. Does
    > any WP support
    > this?

    Not that I know of

    > LaTeX, does, right?

    Nope. LaTeX does the wrong thing here. Frenchies
    have been doing horribles workarounds to make that
    work on LaTeX (hand-made macros to place manually
    quotes at the start of the line, etc.)

    > > And, just to make things a bit more funny, quoted
    > text
    > > inside quoted text should be written as:
    > >
    > > This is <<_quoted "text" a la frech_>>
    >
    > The PDF document I cited has some information on how
    > various WPs
    > and DTP programs handle this. But I believe the
    > quote character
    > selection UI I suggested will provide at least a
    > usuable way to
    > insert the correct quote character, even with 'dumb'
    > smart quotes
    > support.

    Yes, the character selection UI look pretty good. I
    just wanted to know if more complex algorithms were
    possible with the new smart quotes implementation.

    Cheers,

    =====
    Joaquin Cuenca Abela
    e98cuenc@yahoo.com

    __________________________________________________
    Do You Yahoo!?
    HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
    http://www.hotjobs.com



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Aug 20 2002 - 07:58:18 EDT