Smarty Pants: More Unicode Characters

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Tom Emerson <tree at basistech.com> [2005-11-06 18:20]:

> It would be relatively simple to walk through the

> UnicodeData.txt file and find all the characters which have a

> multicharacter compatibility mapping into ASCII and generate

> such a conversion table automagically.


I don’t think SmartyPants would particularly improve by the
addition of a simple-minded table-driven search&replace.

The reason I use SmartyPants is that it uses context, if only a
miniscule amount of it most of the time, in order to quite
reliably divine which substitution to use.

Several of the proposed substitutions will probably be annoying
in various circumstances, unless they’re disambiguated on
context. Some of them probably can’t be disambiguated sanely; I’m
extremely doubtful about the fractions, f.ex. And I’d be rather
annoyed if SmartyPants unicodified my smilies by default.

To do this properly would require that someone pore over the list
of characters and examine ambiguities in their ASCII
transliteration, and decide how to use context to resolve them;
if it is at all possible.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done – but it takes a whole lot
more work than just adding a dumb substitution table if it is to
help more than annoy.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>