> So if two glyphs have enough "visual character" to be used in one > document to express two different meanings, then they should be > encoded as different characters?
Yes, more or less. However, quotation characters need language tagging or something like that; you certainly don't want to have the sitation to ask whether ' is the Byzantine opening quote, or ' the Martian alternate closing quote, or ' the you-name-it. It's a delicate issue. >> Whether a certain character is `opening' or `closing' is a meta >> information, usually depending on the language (or the country, or >> the writing direction, or...), to be provided by a higher level. > > Does it work at all? Why not specify "ISO-..." for each piece of text > (sequence of bytes) of a document on that level? Specifying information > above the encoding makes the "traditional" encodings perfectly > compatible with each other. You don't want to reinvent ISO-2022... > When writing an article in English about German language should one > have to switch the font for each piece of German text containing > quotation marks? This is not necessary, but... > or change the locale settings for each piece? ... this is necessary for correct microtypography. > or issue some variation selection for each piece, so the font can > pick the best glyph? This is another possibility, yes. For example, the `babel' package in LaTeX works like this. Also related are the following two package documentation files: http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/csquotes/csquotes.pdf http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc/latex/csquotes-de/csquotes-DE.pdf The latter is a German translation of the former. Typographically correct quotation is a quite difficult topic. Werner
