Re: Fwd: Smart quotes patch

I ran a quick test:
1) I am using svn so undo/redo is largely broken (doing undo twice
does a redo). However, typing a quote which gets converted and then
pressing undo deletes the quote. AFAIK, that's the right behavior.
2) I replaced the English open quote with the German one, which is
below the line. This works fine.

Challenges:
1) Gerrit brings up an excellent point about how to switch the smart
quote styles, since many languages have multiple formats. On top of
which the Swiss do their German quotes different than the Germans.
Dang foreigners! :)

2) How to switch languages period. If I type an English article with
a German quote, what do you do? Someone suggested checking the
language of the previous character, but that doesn't work for the same
reason it looks like smart quotes were always broken - paragraphs
often start with quotes, which means you have no previous character.

I think the best solution would be a tool bar or dialog option that
allows you to set the quote marks to whatever funky combination your
language/locale uses.

3) I don't know if the non-breaking space in French est possible.

I'd also like to add the option to translate bactick "`" to open quote
and apostrophe "'" to close quote. In English, it is impossible for
the word processor to figure out whether an apostrophe at the
beginning of a word is the start of a quote or an abbreviation used in
speech ('em for them).

Bobby

On Feb 6, 2008 3:04 PM, Gerrit Sangel <z0idberg@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Am Dingsdag 05 Februor 2008 schrieb Martin Sevior:
> > Ah yes this is could be a solution. You can interrogate the character
> > property "LANG" with
> >
> > getView()->getCharFormat(const gchar *** props, true)
> >
> > at the current point. If the language is one like English where standard
> > curly quotes are employed, use the algorithm. In time maybe someone else
> > will implement the below base-line curly quotes for those languages that
> > need them.
> >
> > I agree that curly quotes for English is better than no smart quotes as
> > long as it works.
> >
> > For me the show-stopper is the undo/redo behaviour.
>
> At least for German, this is absolutely no problem. Just replace " with „
> (opening quote) and " with " (closing quote). (But there are also »« used)
>
> The same is for other languages. It's all on Wikipedia.
>
> Doing it via the locale is not a good idea. After all, I would like to write
> some English texts on my German machine, as well ;)
>
> Gerrit Sangel
>
Received on Wed Feb 6 21:46:39 2008