Re: [PATCH] ox.el: add smart quotes for Greek

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Max Nikulin writes:

> I believe, the patch is an improvement. It would be nice to have a
> comment clarifying the choice of secondary opening quote mark, but it
> is not required. It seems there is no recommendations or established 
> practice for documenting of such decisions. I have not tested the
> patch though.

Since it's a "orthotypographical" addition, where there is a reasonable
doubt in one of the characters, I agree that a minimal explanatory note
in the commit message would be desirable. But it would have (IMHO) to be
something very brief.

>> -`org-export-smart-quotes-alist' and `org-export-dictionary'.
>> +`org-export-smart-quotes-' and `org-export-dictionary'.
>
> It it intentional change? I have not found other variables having the
> same prefix.

Oh, sorry. It's a horrible typo: I modified that part involuntarily, and
I didn't see it :-(.

> That character could get better support in future. I know, such chance
> is almost improbable, but imagine, a person familiar with the paper of 
> Haralambous would consider change of the quote mark in question
> believing that Org developers were not aware of the "right" symbol. A 
> comment in the source code may provide a hint that the choice was conscious.
>
> I forgot to mention it in my message from 2020-08-15 that I did not
> find the U+201F character in TeX pre-unicode LG* encodings for Greek.

In fact, the character is only problematic in pdfTeX. In XeTeX and
LuaTeX there is no problem, and you can also use the csquotes package.
But in pdfTeX you can't even get it with the
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} option, which is to be expected, since
Unicode support of imputenc is very limited. LuaTeX is the natural
replacement for pdfTeX, but at the moment we have to maintain backward
compatibility and I can't find a way to represent that character in
pdfTeX. This second level quotes issue is not mentioned by Apostolos
Syropoulos in the babel greek documentation:
(https://www.ctan.org/pkg/babel-greek). There is probably no support for
this character in babel-greek.

Before uploading a corrected version of the patch (with a small
explanatory note), I could consult Haralambous himself by mail, and ask
him what he thinks of this question...

Best regards,

Juan Manuel