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HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

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Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#51

Post by svat »

drfuchs wrote: post #43
neilv wrote: post #29

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…

About your middle paragraph: note that ASCII doesn't have left and right quotes; at 0x60 it has GRAVE ACCENT ` (not a left quote), and at 0x27 it has APOSTROPHE ' (not a right quote). Unfortunately for many years, fonts and terminals (like the SAIL ones you mentioned) continued to encourage abusing these characters as symmetric left- and right-quotes (as they were in some character sets pre-ASCII and even an early version of ASCII), despite their updated definitions.

See Markus Kahn's page at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html which explains it well. (Also: the one-page documentation (plus one page implementation) of the LaTeX “upquote” package: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/upquote/upquote... )

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#52

Post by OJFord »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #12
minimaxir wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are better known as "smart quotes" iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.

Why is OP describing that as “disturbing” (I type with “smart” quotes)? It’s not intentional; it’s just because I’m on an iPhone.[a] On the default keyboard, if I want "dumb" quotes, I have to tap and hold the key to get the popup. Simply tapping the quote key is less effort. [a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.

You can also just turn them off completely. IIRC Android also does it by default. It's one of the first things I look for on a new device, along with disabling haptic feedback and stupid sound effects.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#53

Post by svat »

D13Fd wrote: post #48
drfuchs wrote: post #18

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…

I think “smart quotes” is fine as a name, since most people who type them still do it automatically via a context-based logic (whether it’s a word processor or text box input on an iPhone). And it works better than “curly quotes” since they are not curly in some fonts. 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 “ri…

I know you said “most people”, but I always type these typographically correct quotes manually (no automatic substitution or “smart” quotes involved). It's Opt+[ (etc) on macOS, for example. So the name is disorienting for me at least, and as the top comment said, they predate computers and weren't called “smart” then.

But see also https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ :-)

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#54

Post by Manu40 »

TheDong wrote: post #27
fuckstick wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat (often 0% I think)? Why do we call it a "gravy boat" when it's not literally a boat? Did you know there are male ladybugs? Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term t…

"gravy boat"

Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#55

Post by Manu40 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #14
colejohnson66 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is OP describing that as “disturbing” (I type with “smart” quotes)? It’s not intentional; it’s just because I’m on an iPhone.[a] On the default keyboard, if I want "dumb" quotes, I have to tap and hold the key to get the popup. Simply tapping the quote key is less effort. [a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.

it’s an old gatekeeping / geek dick measuring thing, don’t worry about it

I'm upvoting you, because calling it disturbing really doesn't make sense unless egotism is involved. IMHO.

If someone can explain why it's not just egotism, please go right ahead. Otherwise, it really does seem like it. To me at least.

Other comments try to sort of deal with this problem in their explanations about soft and hard quotes, but they don't really deal with the part about it being disturbing.

What's so disturbing about using a feature available on your device? Especially when it does nothing harmful to the user, or recipients of that users communications?

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#57

Post by corobo »

> There are 126,000+ quotations on HackerNews using smart quotes. I find this deeply disturbing.

Mobile devices appear to do this by default. iOS in my case anyway. I turned them off because it was messing up my hugo blog's frontmatter whenever I start a post on mobile.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#58

Post by samwillis »

corobo wrote: post #57

> There are 126,000+ quotations on HackerNews using smart quotes. I find this deeply disturbing. Mobile devices appear to do this by default. iOS in my case anyway. I turned them off because it was messing up my hugo blog's frontmatter whenever I start a post on mobile.

You have prompted me to check how to turn it off on iOS. Under settings>general>keyboard, un-toggle "smart punctuation". It also turns off tuning "--" into an em dash. Not sure what else it disables.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#59

Post by yellow_lead »

drfuchs wrote: post #18

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…

Somehow, my chinese language option still uses smart quotes. For instance,

“一個句子”

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#60

Post by somat »

flobosg wrote: post #32
Tomte wrote: post #28

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.

On Linux I use Fcitx and Ctrl+Shift+Alt+U to open the Unicode character picker, while on Windows I have my fork of a character picker discovered a while ago ( https://github.com/flobosg/character-picker ) bound to the same shortcut.

read up on the compose key it may change your life for the better. or it may be difficult to replicate on windows/wayland leading to additional stress in your life. or perhaps you enjoy your current setup, which does not sound half bad, although not as good as the compose key.

Most linux desktops are different and more complicated but here is how I set mine up on openbsd.

pick a key that is handy but you don't use much, for me this was the context menu key, on many european keyboards there is an altgr key set aside for this exact use case.

in ~/.xsession add a line like "xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'"

create a file ~/.XCompose to setup your own compose sequences. mine looks like

    #load system compose files
    include "%L"
        : "\xf0\x9f\x95\xb8" # spiderweb
read /usr/X11R6/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose to get a feel for the existing compose sequences.
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