It would be very useful for me if latex2html did a better job of converting
double quotation marks (``, '', and "). I know this subject has come up on this
list before, and there's a serious difference of opinion on this issue, so
I'd better explain the rationale carefully.
I understand the difference between logical markup and typographic appearance,
but this is a logical markup issue. In latex, `` denotes a single character,
namely a double left quotation mark. It does *not* denote a sequence of two
single ` characters. Unfortunately, ISO-LATIN-1 doesn't contain this character,
but Unicode does. When generating ISO-LATIN-1 encoded HTML, it is arguable that
the double quote character (") is closer in logical meaning to a double left
quotation mark than two ` characters. When generating Unicode encoded HTML,
there's no doubt about it: the correct character is available (“) and it
ought to be used.
Now, I know that with some fonts two ` characters are similar in visual
appearance to a left double quote, so the error isn't always noticeable.
But in other fonts these (logically different) characters have different
visual appearances, and then it's obvious that latex2html has generated the
wrong logical markup.
The behaviour I would like to see is this:
(with -html_version 4.0,unicode)
latex -> HTML
`` “
'' ”
" ” (Because in latex " means a right double quote!)
(without the unicode option)
latex -> HTML
`` "
'' "
" "
Is there any chance of these mappings being added? Or at least being made
a selectable option?
Thanks,
Michael Roe
Center for Communications Systems Research
