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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

cl.cam.ac.uk

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Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#161

Post by jimmies »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #158
jimmies wrote: post #132

I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever…

Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.

I never said I hate the 69 quotation thing. I said I hate the automatic conversion of the straight quote to the 69 quote behind my back.

Imagine they automatically replace the "fi" with the styled "fi" behind your back and breaks text searches and normal text files.

You can be snobby all you want, as long as you initialed it and know you don't break programs' assumptions. No one says you can't have nice shit with LaTEX and Pagemaker when you need it.

Here people who just open the file and save it, or copy the text and paste it, don't mean it, yet it happens without them ever knowing.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#162

Post by daemin »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #158
jimmies wrote: post #132

I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever…

Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.

It would be fine if it just changed visually depending on the context, without actually changing the underlying character data.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#163

Post by ygra »

Tepix wrote: post #152

It seems that half of the people in this company use the wrong acute sign `as an apostrophe instead of ' or ’. Unfortunately it's the half that creates presentations and talks to customers. It looks terrible and to me it's a disgrace! Example: it`s versus it's or it’s. (first one is wrong).

I've seen a café which had its name written in large, lit letters on the façade and it included the following gem: Cafe`. Yes, the wrong accent, and not even combined. Easy access to DTP tools (or even a word processor) for the typographically uneducated masses ends up with quite painful results sometimes.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#164

Post by LeoNatan25 »

jimmies wrote: post #161
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.

I never said I hate the 69 quotation thing. I said I hate the automatic conversion of the straight quote to the 69 quote behind my back. Imagine they automatically replace the "fi" with the styled "fi" behind your back and breaks text searches and normal text files. You can be snobby all you want, as long as you initialed it and know you don't break programs' assumptions. No one says you can't have nice shit with LaT…

Regarding fi, it just shows how broken most search engines are.

As a reader, what is the difference between between fi and fi? Or between a and а?

If the search engine is distinguishing those because of Unicode characters, it has failed completely.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#165

Post by LeoNatan25 »

daemin wrote: post #162
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.

It would be fine if it just changed visually depending on the context, without actually changing the underlying character data.

Then it would have to be a feature of the font, and I am not familiar with any font that does that automatically. Technically, it might be possible, with advanced scripting available in OpenType, but considering how even the most basic of ligatures are unsupported under most Linux and Windows fonts, I would not have my hopes up to have this any time soon.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#166

Post by pluma »

PeterisP wrote: post #31
koolba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to. You can put the mdash directly in comments: — As opposed to regular dash: -

Well, since my keyboard doesn't have an mdash key, if there's no support for something like — or --- then I can't use mdashes.

If you're on Linux (maybe macOS supports this too?) you can open the keyboard settings and turn one of several keys into the Compose/Multi key (I picked CapsLock because I rarely hit it on accident and don't use it). Then you can type all kinds of weird combinations:

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...

For example, em dash is Compose+minus+minus+minus, en dash is Compose+minus+minus+period.

It's also useful for foreign glyphs like Compose+a+a for the Nordic å, Compose+s+s for German ß (with Shift it becomes ẞ, which the new German orthography rules officially recognise!), Compose+quote+ for the various umlauts and Compose+i+period for the dotless ı (with Shift it becomes the dotted İ).

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#167

Post by pluma »

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 wrote: post #57
Symbiote wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users should enable the compose key, it's very useful. Test it with: setxkbmap -option compose:menu Then press the menu/compose key (next to right control), then C, then =. You get €. Try compose, 1, 2 for ½. Compose, ^, 3 for ³. Compose, A, : for Ä. It's pretty intuitive for the most useful characters, and easily the fastest way I have of typing the ö, ñ and å in various colleagues' names.

Worth noting that international layouts (with dead keys) support many of those without the use of compose key (for obvious reasons not your first example – but the € symbol has its own key combination at least where it's commonly used). I admit it might be hard to adjust to caret being a dead key, though.

I use the default German keyboard layout. Even with dead keys I wouldn't have Nordic characters or the Turkish dotless i and dotted I. I love the Compose key. It's actually making me consider using the US layout because the lack of German glyphs was what was keeping me back.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#168

Post by sjy »

int_19h wrote: post #118
evincarofautumn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I’ve never cared for it. For these reasons I’ve decided to take a stand and avoid using the grave accent for anything in a programming language I’m working on. Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. I guess you could argue for $trings (BASIC) or $calars (Perl) if you hav…

> Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. By that metric, wouldn't & be too Anglo-centric, and # be too Euro-centric? There are layouts out there on which neither is readily available.

If anything, & is Latin rather than English :-)

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#169

Post by mort96 »

coldtea wrote: post #77
lisper wrote: post #41

The fact that ASCII does not have balanced quotes is one of the great catastrophes of computing. It makes everything more complicated than it needs to be, from embedding code in strings to parsing CSV files, to regexps. For example, if I want to embed a quoted string in another quoted string, I have to escape the inner quotes like so: "This is string containing an embedded \"quoted\" string" Then I have to think abou…

> All this horrible complexity could have been avoided if we could just write Only if there was no chance of unbalanced quotes to need to be in the string.

You'd still have escape sequences for those cases.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#170

Post by jiggunjer »

mark-r wrote: post #39
PeterisP wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since my keyboard doesn't have an mdash key, if there's no support for something like — or --- then I can't use mdashes.

If I need a special character, I find a web page or document that has it and use copy/paste.

I have an A4 pinned next to me with all the windows Alt codes. Old-school methods are fastest and I subconsciously learn them by heart over the years.
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