Re: tick and backtick in unicode

[Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Are you saying that under your interpretation there is no way in
> Unicode to display left and right single quotes?

No.  Unicode has left and right single quotes.

> IMVHO, such an interpretation is silly, since the English speaking
> people have been using left and right single (or double) quotes for
> ages to mark direct speach and the like.

I guess you're talking about computer usage ;)  In previous times, there
was a typewriter offering apostrophe (w/o direction) and accents only.
Then people started to misuse the grave accent as left single quote.

> Removing these characters from Ascii or Latin-1
> (or Unicode) means that it is not possible to express normal English
> text using that encoding.

That's a silly conclusion ;) There's no left double quote neither...

> FWIW, TeX also uses `single quotes' like this.  By saying this, I mean
> that when you provide TeX with an input that has `single quotes', then
> the output will contain a single left and a single right quote.

Please, just read Markus Kuhn's article.  He quotes Donald E. Knuth:

    Donald Knuth's <A HREF=
    "http://www-cs-staff.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/abcde.html#texbk">TeXbook</A>
    (chapter 2, page 3, end of second paragraph) has actually warned TeX
    users already since 1986 that the apostrophe and grave accent shapes
    can show up as required by ISO and Unicode and not as used in the
    rest of the TeXbook.

Of course, Knuth doesn't mention ISO and Unicode but mentions the
problem in general.

> I think it is not useful to make fonts such that TeX input looks
> asymmetrical,

We'll have to learn to live with this hassle.

> nor such that Emacs Lisp code looks asymmetrical.

Emacs code isn't affected; only quoted strings inside comments.
According to Markus only m4 is affected -- he recommends to make use of
'changequote'.

> And I don't believe that shell code looks silly with left and right
> quotes at all,

It does.  And: using ETL fonts it's hard to distinguish both.  Proper
back ticks (grave accent) are much better to recognize.  Recent X fonts
are already changed.

Please, don't forget to read (it isn't that long):

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

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