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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
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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




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