Re: [Texmacs-dev] Proposal for consens: Quotation mark styles

[Norbert Nemec]

Am Freitag, 14. November 2003 12:58 schrieb Joris van der Hoeven:
> And the Dutch style: ,,blah''

So, "dutch"-style would be 99-99 - correct?

> I think that it might be even better to insert both the opening and
> the closing quotes when pressing ", or maybe only when the automatic
> bracket closing option is selected.

That's a great idea: make ["] insert a pair of automatic quotes and place the 
cursor in between.

How about ["] [tab] for inserting a pair of automatic single quotes?

> > I guess, most German speakers would prefer to type ["] even if they want
> > to see swiss quotes.
>
> Is that so? Germans: please give your opinion!

I am a German user myself. I guess, only experts would even think about swiss 
codes. There might be some surprise when typing ["] produces a pair of swiss 
codes, but everybody should understand intuitively and be happy with it.

As David put it in his mail, even clueless French PC users will just use ["], 
so why not make this the default way to type pairs of automatic quotes in any 
language? The problem with using [<] [<] for automatic quotes is, that, 
without knowledge of the language, the machine does not know, whether you 
mean opening french or closing swiss quotes. Therefore, best one could to is 
to insert hard-coded quotes that way, which don't have know about semantics.

As for references to existing studies: I am 100% hobby-typographer without any 
expert knowledge on such details. Best reference to start from is probably 
the behaviour of MS Word. It is far from typographically clean, but it is 
what people are used to. Any other software that did not reinvent the wheel 
propably started out from the MS Word behaviour.

For Germans, MS Word has now comfortable way to enter swiss quotes (AFAIK) 
german quotes are entered by typing ["] the system decides on context 
(preceeding character) whether you want opening (lower 99) or closing (upper 
66) quotes.

Ciao,
Nobbi

-- 
______________________Norbert Nemec <address@hidden>

    Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
    Institut für Theoretische Physik III
    Staudtstr. 7  ...  D-91058 Erlangen  ...  Room No. U1.526
    Tel: +49 9131 / 85-28816  ...  Mobile: +49 179 / 7475199