Re: standard quotes for PDF

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

In article <address@hidden>,
Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>    makes sure that a regular quote ( ' ) is printed using a regular quote
>    in the output.
>
>I am not at all sure that it is an improvement, in terms of the
>typographic output, to replace the normal directed right quote from the
>typewriter fonts with the undirected quote at position 015.  I think
>many people would be unpleasantly surprised.  I know I would be.

Yes, I understand, and I took that position myself at first, but we
kept getting bugreports by people that cut & paste coding and were
completely confused.  The difference is hard to spot visually.

>    We have lots of users that cut & paste code from PDF files, which
>
>Cutting and pasting from PDF files works fine for me, but maybe I don't
>have the right expectations.  E.g., I run pdftex on the file below,
>select it all in xpdf, paste it into an emacs buffer, and get out normal
>characters as I would expect.  Your patch actually makes cutting &
>pasting work worse for me.  Odd.

Sorry, I was being unclear. The problem is with @example, @verbatim
and @code.

Cutting & paste with evince 0.5.1
@example
  g'16
@end example
@verbatim
  g'16
@end verbatim



Without patch, we get curly quotes, looks nice, but it is technically
wrong. Cut & pasting from evince PDF into gedit UTF-8 produces

  g’16

This is  67 e2 80 99 31 36, with e2 80 99 as a UTF-8 encoded  

  U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

With patch I get 

  g'16 

67 27 31 36, which is the plain ASCII quotation mark.


Perhaps it could be an optional feature.