Re: [Texmacs-dev] Proposal for consens: Quotation mark styles

[David Allouche]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 11:29:16AM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> 
> Internal handling
> ===========
> Every style should be supported in every language environment so the user can 
> choose.
> 
> My personal proposal:
> * support "hard-coded" quotation marks as well as "automatic" quotation 
> marks. 
> * The hard-coded marks should be displayed and printed independant of any 
> environment setting. It should not be too simple to enter hard-coded 
> quotation marks, so they are really only used in special situations.
> * The automatic marks should be displayed and printed depending on a 
> configurable option. This option should have a default depending on the 
> language of the text, but it should be possible to override that default by 
> some variable setting. Automatic quotation marks should be simple to enter by 
> keyboard. See next section.

So, basically, there would be one character for each hard-coded quote
mark and small collection of automatic marks. Say, automatic ["], [']
and [`].

Maybe there should be an exact mapping between keys and
automatic marks, that is no automatic mark for [,][,]. Or maybe some
sequences should be folded in one automatic mark using either a syntax
(ligatures) or a shortcut. Or maybe some keys should yield the same
automatic mark.

This issue seems very complex to me. Before making a definite choice,
each possibility would have to be explored in great detail... There is
probably some data around about input methods for punctuations on
national keyboards, so we would not need to reivent this wheel.

> Keyboard sequences
> ==============
> This will probably have to be dependant on the language.
> 
> For double quotes, Germans and English speakers only have one key  ["], 
> anyway, it is fairly simple to decide from the context whether opening or 
> closing quotes should be used: leading whitespace indicate opening quotes, 
> leading letters indicate closing quotes, most leading special characters 
> indicate closing quotes (except "(", "[", "\"" and maybe a few others)
> 
> The Alt-l/Alt-r technique can be used to override that automagic behavior by 
> hand.
> 
> I guess, most German speakers would prefer to type ["] even if they want to 
> see swiss quotes.
> 
> I have no idea yet, how single quotes should be entered. The [']-key would 
> usually be used for apostrophes, the [`] is not really handy if it is 
> configured as dead-key for assembling accented characters. Proposals?

Maybe [']['] (double apostrophe) could be used as a shortcut.

Generally I find input methods in the style of emacs *-postfix methods
very convenient and natural (at least for french).

Note that currently TeXmacs internally makes no distinction between
"apostrophe" (U+0027) and "right single quotation mark" (U+2019).
Actually Unicode says U+2019 is "the preferred character to use for
apostrophe", but for compatibility with all the broken software out
there (and general user expectation) I decided to use U+0027 in exported
HTML.

All this to say that for "right single quotation mark" to be exported
correctly as "›", TeXmacs font handling in text mode would have
to be fixed so a separate universal symbol could be used. 

> What keys are French speakers used to use for typing quotes?

French PC users (most of the time) have no clue in typography and
happily use american double quotes. Though they would probably be happy
most of the time if the default were to insert french quotes instead.

The ones who have some kind of a clue, would probably use [<][<] and
[>][>].

The ones who know what they are doing would have a Macintosh (troll!)
and look for the fancy keychords for french quotes which have
traditionally been part of the french Macintosh keyboard layout.


All in all, I think your proposal makes a lot of sense, but it would be
nice to have references to existing studies on that subject.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa