Re: Straight Quotes / Curly Quotes

[Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net>]

> Am 18.06.2021 um 04:08 schrieb Thangalin <thangalin@gmail.com>:
> 
> Hraban,
> 
> > In what kind of workflows does your program make sense?
> 
> Have you looked around the web lately?
> 
> KeenWrite (https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite), my plain text editor, can neither convert nor easily type curly quotes into the application. Recently, I added ConTeXt integration for exporting to PDF files. ConTeXt doesn't curl the quotes, which I found a little surprising (because LaTeX has a quote curling package). Not seeing an obvious solution, I coded my own library because all the other libraries I found were either not up to the task or required a massive natural language parser dependency.
> 
> My workflow will be: Edit plain text in KeenWrite, export to XHTML, curl the quotes, run ConTeXt to typeset XHTML.
> 
> Another workflow: Edit plain text in KeenWrite, export to XHTML, curl the quotes, upload to CMS.
> 
> The problem is that when typewriters were invented, curly quotes didn't make it onto the popular layouts. Then, after Unicode, curly closing single quotes and curly apostrophes were not made unique. HTML entities get it right, though, with l/rdquo, l/rsquo, and apos. C'est la vie.

I’m used to type special characters with key combinations, even use my own keyboard layout to access more accented characters via dead keys. (Nothing fancy like Neo, but just extensions to Apple’s German keyboard layout.) I always wanted to port that to my Linux machine, but even the default (German) keyboard layout for Linux lets me access curly quotes. And I didn’t find a handy keylayout editor like “Ukelele” for Linux. Anyway...

Using \quotation / \quote I avoid typing quotation marks in most cases.

There are exceptions – Hans mentioned missing or open-ended quotes, and sometimes the nesting of commands gets hairy (if quotations span paragraphs with additional markup), so that I manually type the quotation marks.

I regard it a bad idea to make straight quotation marks (inch marks) active to allow for “curling” them and would suggest the csquotes package with its \enquote command for LaTeX, even if it’s missing the setups for many languages.

In HTML you should be able to use <q> – I know that doesn’t work reliably in browsers (some add straight quotes to my CSS-configured guillemets).

Anyway, sorry for being negative on your project. It’s great if it helps you and others.

Hraban
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