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[Texmacs-dev] Quotation marks
From: |
Norbert Nemec |
Subject: |
[Texmacs-dev] Quotation marks |
Date: |
Mon, 27 Oct 2003 18:32:28 +0100 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.5.4 |
Hi there,
two separate points:
1. Opening quotes are displayed incorrectly in the new web-documentation.
(e.g. http://www.texmacs.org/tmdoc/main/links/man-glossary.en.html)
2. How are quotation marks handled in general? Different languages have
different rules like
,,German''
>>alternative German<<
``English''
<<French>>
<<Spanish>>
etc.
(Where, in this context, ' should look like a comma (tail downwards) and `
like a comma turned 180 degrees. Unicode would be needed to type this
correctly...)
Some interesting documentation can be found at:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rolfruhig/2828PDF/2002Typesetting.pdf
(Talks about spanish, but has many international details as well.)
I believe, TeXmacs should somehow have automatic support for that. Currently,
I observe the following:
* Double character ,, << and >> are automatically transformed into single
characters.
* Double apostrophes '' and `` on the other hand stay two characters (even
though they do look correct.)
* in verbatim mode, ,, is transformed, while << and >> stay separate
This will probably cause some confusion and pose a problem for converters of
all kinds.
Unfortunately, there are probably very different ways people are used to type
quotation marks depending on their language. In German, most people have
accepted that there are no lower quotation marks on the keyboard and expect
the program to convert automatically to the correct ones, when a ASCII " is
typed. (The transformation can happen simply depending on whether there is a
whitespace before the " or not.)
English typers often don't even know there are different quotation marks
because opening and closing marks look so similar.
I don't know whether the issue has been addressed already, or how it is
handled in TeX. I fear that a simple solution will not be sufficient.
In any case, the issue should not be left to the user, since many people would
just use the plain old ASCII " now knowing any better...
Ciao,
Nobbi
--
______________________Norbert Nemec <address@hidden>
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Institut für Theoretische Physik III
Staudtstr. 7 ... D-91058 Erlangen ... Room No. U1.526
Tel: +49 9131 / 85-28816 ... Mobile: +49 179 / 7475199
- [Texmacs-dev] Quotation marks,
Norbert Nemec <=