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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

#61

Post by elcapitan »

Tomte wrote: post #39
cortesoft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be typographically correct, but they are incorrect for code, and cause so many issues. I'd rather have typographically incorrect quotes that work everywhere.

Why would you type them for code? I'm not arguing for the mobile phone automatisms. I insist on separate keys for different quotes.

It's true that people wouldn't use them on their own, but there are a lot of cases (especially blog software, automatic ebook formatting etc), where code examples get messed up subtly by software changing code quotes to standard quotes, often invisibly. The same for minus signs vs dashes.

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

#62

Post by fuckstick »

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…

> Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat

Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why. Someone has answered your gravyboat question. And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting.

> Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to

Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine.

> I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.

The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables.

I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”. I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.

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

#63

Post by aendruk »

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…

Thank you. There’s nothing “smart” about my quotation marks; I type them with physical keys just like any other punctuation.

  Left: “
  Right: Shift+“
  Typewriter: AltGr+“

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

#65

Post by anjbe »

bombcar wrote: post #49
drfuchs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect if you dug back you'd find that very old monospace fonts had ` and ' looking like mirrors of each other, but once they realized that nobody uses ` and instead always uses ' and ", they made them vertical so that they wouldn't look "that bad".

In the old days of ASCII several characters were heavily overloaded. On teletypes it was not unusual to create accented characters by typing ` or ' (which looked more like ´), then backspacing and typing a vowel, to get (e.g.) è or é. The same could be done with ~ to create ñ, if the tilde were high up like ˜, or with " to simulate an umlaut.

And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus.

If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments:

- example (U+002D hyphen‐minus)

+ example (plus)

− example (U+2212 minus)

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

#66

Post by corobo »

samwillis wrote: post #58
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.

Thank you for that, in hindsight I should have chucked that info in!

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

#67

Post by bentley »

svat wrote: post #51
drfuchs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

That’s the Unicode way of doing things (which I heartily subscribe to), but in ASCII’s original conception what you describe as “abuse” was a feature. For instance, in RFC 20 which is dated 1969, 0x27 is named “Apostrophe (Closing Single Quotation Mark/Acute Accent)” and 0x60 is named “Grave Accent (Opening Single Quotation Mark)”. Additionally, double quote also served as a diaeresis, and comma as a cedilla.

Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.

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

#68

Post by anjbe »

somat wrote: post #60
flobosg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

I do the same, except instead of xmodmap I use “setxkbmap -option compose:ralt” (plus a few other options) as described in the xkeyboard-config(7) manpage. It has some useful features: https://man.openbsd.org/xkeyboard-config.7

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

#69

Post by anjbe »

drran wrote: post #40
fuckstick wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they soft or smart? That makes no sense - they’re just open and close quotation marks.

Because option to enable substitution of minutes(') and seconds(") symbols by proper quotation marks is often called as «Enable smart quotes». For example: 10° 33' 19" -> 10° 33« 19». Very smart!

Good post! I must point out, though, the correct symbol for minutes and seconds is actually the prime. As in, 10° 33′ 19″.

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

#70

Post by Beltalowda »

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…

Words change; terminology changes; language changes. It is the way of things.

In that sense I think "straight quotes" are fine too, although “smart quotes” arguably look a bit nicer, but that's a matter of personal taste IMO.

Related comment from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626

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