Re: Opening quotes problem with context.

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
>> I note that the plain TeX version of closing quotes, '' still works.
>
> It doesn't. You get two apostrophes (which usually happen to look like
> a double quotation mark).

I need to add that converting character 27 (') into apostrophe was
considered a crucial functionality, so it was kept. Nobody can imagine
getting the proper apostrophe on keyboard and its use is very common.

On the other hand many languages use different quotation marks and
using ``these'' is completely "americanocentric". On top,
auto-replacement lead to inability to typeset the actual backtick (`)
when it's needed. So yes, getting rid of `` replaced by quotation by
default *was* an improvement.

If you are worried about the number of strokes you can always
configure your keyboard to give the quotation marks by pressing
alt-gr+something (an equivalent effort of typing an uppercase letter).
Or you can define
    \def\q#1{\quotation{#1}}
The big advantage of \quotation{...} is that it automatically gives
you the right quotation marks for the active language. And for me it's
also convenient that I can easily switch which quotation marks are
used (both guilemets and "double comma-style" are allowed in our
grammar, and I sometimes change my mind about which ones should be
used in the middle of the project). Or I could change the quoted text
to become italic.

Mojca

PS: I'm sometimes mad at what TeX did. Every (La)TeX user read a
(La)TeX tutorial at some point and nowadays probably 80% users in my
country still use "\v{c}" (not being aware that they could type the
Unicode characters the same way as they do in Word), either the wrong
font encoding (OT1; without proper hyphenation and with weirdly
composed glyphs) or the bitmap fonts, and the grammatically incorrect
version of ``quotes''. This is what they learnt from manuals. In
ConTeXt UTF-8 just works and \quotation{...} is a lot better than
those weird ``artefacts''.
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