Re: Problem with German quotes and kerning

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

Mojca,

thanks a lot for you reply!

On Jan 25, 2006, at 1:45 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On the transferred page:
>      http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Wishes_for_Latin_Modern
> there are already kerning issues listed.
>
> If the problem on that page is not expressed clearly enough (and if
> the proposal is not OK), add your comments to that page.

Well, the problem is that this is not really relevant to my question.  
Of course it would be good to have proper kerning for German quotes  
implemented in the fonts, Latin Modern or any other font. But the way  
this is now handled in lang-ger.tex, this kerning is not applied in  
ConTeXt! So even if LM were perfect in this regard, we still wouldn't  
have properly kerned German quotes (am I making sense here, or is  
this not clear enough?).

>
> I agree that kerning "German" style of quotation marks was (and
> perhaps still is?) horrible, perhaps slightly better in LM than it was
> in CM. We use them as well (to be honest - 95% of LaTeX-people uses
> the wrong ones).
>
> I use \quotation because of these reasons:
> - I never know which is the proper command to get the desired
> quotation marks with combination of ", `, ', ...
> - I trust Hans that the macro is optimized in such a way that the
> hyphenation and everything else on the word boundary will be OK
> (although I'm not sure what happens to kerning)
> - I can simply redefine the quotation marks or the style of text to be
> used, for example it's easy to replace them by guillemet/guillemot
> alternative if necessary
>
> It might be a personal decision which ones one uses, but I would say
> that using "` vs. \quotation is approximately the same as using \"{a}
> vs ä. All of them work, but the second variant is somewhat cleaner.

OK, this makes sense, especially your third point. If you use ConTeXt  
exclusively, quotation{} and \quote{} may have advantages, but you  
can't copy/paste text into, say, a file to be processed with LaTeX.  
And I use emacs + auctex, so I don't have to remember what I need to  
type, it is done automatically. OTOH, I could also configure auctex  
to write \quotation{ when I type ". It this meant that I would get  
proper kerning, I'd go for it...

Thanks, and best

Thomas