Re: Smart quotes for Greek (questions for a possible patch)

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi Michalis. Thank you for your comments.

mvar writes:

> i can confirm the «» characters are the proper ones for the first level
> of quoting..Now about second level, personally i haven't seen such nesting in
> ages but IIRC they should be the ones (or *very* similar) in the linked image 
> you posted ->
> \textquotedblleft and \textquotedblright. I've no idea how these
> translate to UTF. Note that the standard greek keyboards & keymaps do not have
> any of these characters mapped by default (not even «» ), most people use the 
> standard
> english double/single quotes, at least in electronic writing (articles,
> daily communication etc).
> Protesilaos (cc) might have a better view on this matter.

Yes, I think \textquotedblleft and \textquotedblright could be a good
solution. Those are the first level quotes for English and other
languages, and the second level quotes for Spanish, so in this case the
Spanish settings in `org-export-smart-quotes-alist' could be copied for
Greek. In Unicode they are equivalent to

“ LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK U+201C 

and

” RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK U+201D 

In fact, the second quotes, U+201D, would be the correct ones for Greek
(always, according to Haralambous). The only difference is for the
opening quotes: in this case Greek would use (again, according to
Haralambous) the character U+201F: ‟ (DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION
MARK), which is like the U+201C char, but upside down. In LuaTeX and
XeTeX (and in HTML) there is no problem to represent that character,
because these two TeX engines are based on Unicode. The problem would be
the backward compatibility with pdfTeX. I haven't managed to get this
character in pdfTeX using inputenc with the utf8 option.

Therefore, we could leave for the second-level quotation marks the
tandem U+201C/201D, as the lesser evil. Let's see what Protesilaos
thinks.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel