International quotes (Was: typography of the apostrophe)

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> [2005-10-21 02:00]:

> The bugzilla reference from Damian Cugley gave me an idea for

> international quotes. Instead of trying to be "smart" about it

> and replace standard English by their localized equivalents,

> why not  define different shortcuts for different quotes.

> 

> For example, German  quotes could be written like this:

> 

>     ,,bottom and left doublequotes''


It’s not a bad idea, and supporting it in *addition* to more
specific support would be great.

But with regard to German, relying on this kind of
transliteration has a problem: noone actually writes like that.
Keyboards have no way to enter bottom doublequotes at all, which
is no wonder considering the common non-Unicode charsets do not
even contain such a character. So the end result is that everyone
writes German with straight doublequotes for quotations.

But since English-style quotes are incorrect in German, there is
no reason for properly typeset German to contain them; it would
make sense for anything that typographically smartens text to
assume that in German text, straight quotes as supposed to become
angle marks.

So I think it would be nice to be able to tell SmartyPants which
language a document is in, and have it adjust some defaults
accordingly, when it makes sense to do so. Having explicit ASCII
transliterations for the various quote marks is still useful, so
that when you’re mixing languages in a single document, you could
use the particular kind of quotes you want explicitly.

So far, I don’t see this as trying to be particularly clever;
there would be one set of defaults per document. What would
certainly be folly is for SmartyPants to try to support
mixed-language documents by changing defaults during processing.
That is, as far as I can tell, why the Mozilla folk are having so
much sorrow over bug #16206.


> This would only require SmartyPants to recognize the `,,`

> construct  as a lower double quote. As suggested previously,

> angle marks could be handled this way:

> 

>     >>angle marks, but opposite to the French style<<

>     >angle marks, but opposite to the French style<

> 

> […]

> 

> The other unanswered problem is that simple angle quotes could

> be mistaken and replace a *true* greater than or less than, so

> it may be better to forget about them.


Not only that, but at least the right-pointing single angle mark
<em >clashes </em >with HTML tag parsing. Granted, so long as the
angle marks point “inward,” German-style (opening angle mark
points right, closing points left), you can probably disambiguate
95-99% of the cases correctly.

But from where I sit it seems impossible to disambiguate single
angle marks that point “outward” from HTML tags. (F.ex., what
about the letter <p>?)

So I’d say a transliteration for single angle marks right out of
the window.


> From the table on the Quotation mark Wikipedia entry, I see

> that  some languages (Estonian, Icelandic) use the same double

> quotes as  German, but the closing quote is curled in the

> opposite direction.  Quotes in those languages could be written

> this way:

> 

>     ,,bottom and left doublequotes``

> 

> and turned into this:

> 

>     „bottom and left doublequotes“


Actually you’re mixing up the styles. English would be
transliterated like so:

    ``left and right doublequotes''

With that, it’s the German quote-mark style that would be
transliterated as

    ,,bottom and left doublequotes``

but the result would indeed be as you show. Incidentally, if your
fixed-width font has the typical rendition of backticks, you can
see in this transliteration the reason why angle marks are
preferred for German text in web typography – the left
doublequote looks funny at that position with most fonts. If it’s
actually shaped like “66”, then it looks correct on both ends.

The Estonian/Icelandic style would be transliterated as

    ,,bottom and right doublequotes''

and would produce

    „bottom and right doublequotes”


> A notable exception is ”...” where both quotes are curled the

> same  way as the closing quote in English (used by Swedish,

> Finnish, and  Dutch (alternative quoting style) [^1]).


This could be written in transliteration as

    ''...''

which results in two right doublequotes.

In any case, I like the idea of having explicit transliterations;
it would be helpful. But it would be nice if the defaults could
be adjustable to the main language used in the document so that
text written with common habits would still come out the other
end well smartened.

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