41–50 of 85 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
smart/soft quotes are usually: ‘|’|“|” but there are also other quoting glyphs in ASCII but especially UTF-8
Why are they soft or smart? That makes no sense - they’re just open and close quotation marks.
A PM somewhere probably thought "smart quotes" sounded neat, and here we are.
They aren't smart or soft, they are typographically correct. On PC I have AutoHotKey bindings for German and English quotes, single and double, and I'm usually using them.
This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the docum…
TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I…
It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX).
Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
To all those who are confused, smart quotes or soft quotes are those context aware quote marks that some word processors insert which depending on context, will put either closing or opening quote marks.
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That's incorrect. This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language. Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why…
They’re not smart quotes - they're just open and close quotation marks. What is smart about them? And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other. People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.
i.e. - the quotes are smart because they adapt to your region.
this title makes me roll my eyes. such a blatant attempt at confusing-titleism
This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the docum…
If you’re going to be pedantic, I’m not sure that “left-quote” or “right-quote” is correct either. Shouldn’t it be “left double quotation mark” or “right double quotation mark”?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I…
Interestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature. It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully sla…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I…
Interestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature. It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully sla…
Those HTML entities are then curled correctly when any theme[2] is applied.
What bytes is not having a separate glyph for a curled apostrophe because it makes detection of British (or nested) quotations a difficult chore for natural language processors. To get a curled apostrophe, word processors inject the semantically incorrect right-curled single quote, which ought to be reserved for a closing quotation mark exclusively.
There are a few fonts that do curl the apostrophe, such as GFS Didot[3].
[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite
[1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xht...