On Wednesday, August 14, 2002, at 01:24 PM, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> > I had an idea about the smart quotes. The smartquote problem is > algorithmically identical to the shaping of Arabic glyphs. > Consequently the internal shaper (in HEAD) could be used to shape > quotes on the fly for the screen/printer without changing the actual > character in the document. Further, with very little extra effort, the > quote translation could be locale- specific, so that, for instance, in > Czech the opening quote would placed below the base line. > > There are only two small problems with this: (a) the exporters to > formats in which smart quotes make sense would need to use the > shaping engine to get the correct version into the document; this > would be very simple. (b) mechanism is needed for allowing the user > to force the basic quote shape. If the user never wanted this > behaviour, they would just turn smart quotes off, there is preference > of that. The way I though it could be handled in isolated cases is to > tie a zero-width-non-breaking space to some key, say alt+spacebar, > and the user could surround such a quote with these spaces, thus > making it into stand alone one (== the basic form). I think that this > is > entirely adequate, for the need to do this will be extremely rare > (remember, we do not change the quote code in the document). The solution sounds feasible for actually performing the character remapping to screen. A larger and probably more interesting problem would be how to identify these smart-glyphs and differentiate between these and normal ones (the " inch marker, mismatched start/end quote pairs, ... Do you have any idea of how to feasibly do this? Might the unicode website help us? Dom
