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Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/internationa


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2015 15:25:49 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.1.0

On 09/02/2015 10:43 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
' is an_apostrophe_.  Changing it to an open single quote
mark in words like "don't" is utterly wrong

I assume you meant “close single quote” not “open single quote”. (It would indeed be utterly wrong to transliterate apostrophe to open single quote, but Emacs doesn’t do that.)

The initial version of the quote-tranformation code behaved as you suggested, and left isolated apostrophes alone. But Dmitry pointed out that apostrophe in English is represented by right single quotation mark as standard typographic practice in fonts with directed quotes, so I changed Emacs to translate all non-escaped apostrophes. In practice most isolated apostrophes in docstrings and diagnostics are intended to be English apostrophes, so it seemed appropriate to transliterate them as in English, of course with an escape hatch for those intended to be Elisp apostrophes.

For more about common practice with apostrophes in natural-language text, please see <http://www.languagegeek.com/typography/apostrophes.html>.



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