From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 23:50:44 EDT
--- Joaquin Cuenca Abela <e98cuenc@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > 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).
Yes French orthography does demand a non-breaking
half-width space inside guillemets (angle quote
marks). Unicode has such a character U+202F but it
doesn't seem well supported. We have a couple of
options here. We can just use the normal non-breaking
space, U+00A0 for now and upgrade when the character
has wide support. Or we can insert the correct
character and remap to U+00A0. It probably depends
how much incompatibility we'd cause for other
software.
I'd suggest doing the remap anyway since we're going
to encounter this along with other weird characters
that we'll have to remap, and maybe an option or just
#ifdefs around which character we put in the document
so people can experiment.
> > 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 >>
English actually does this too but only accross
paragraphs as far as I'm aware.
> > This will be much more difficult to implement.
> > Does any WP support this?
Can't we just reset any quote pairing logic at the
ends of paras or lines as required by the language?
> 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.)
So can you get a cheque from Knuth or what? (=
> > > 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_>>
English does the same: I said, "he said, 'she
said "hello" ' ". It's not common and that's an ugly
example.
> > 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.
I think we need to think up all the edge cases so we
can design the best smart-quote system.
Can anybody provide comments on what will be needed
for other languages? What about Hebrew, Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese? Comment in this thread or in the
bug report here please:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1510
I did some tests on Word 2000 a while ago - I'll try
to dig up the results.
Andrew Dunbar.
> Cheers,
>
>
> =====
> Joaquin Cuenca Abela
> e98cuenc@yahoo.com
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
> http://www.hotjobs.com
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Aug 20 2002 - 23:54:05 EDT