Re: "Smart" quotes

["Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@kli.org>]

On 05/23/2012 06:17 PM, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
> Hello,
>
>
> "Mark E. Shoulson"<mark@kli.org>  writes:
>
>> "Smart" quotes can be annoying when they aren't smart enough. But when
>> they work you can miss them. I'm attaching a patch that defines a
>> custom variable org-smart-quotes (nil by default), which when non-nil
>> causes the " and ' characters to display as “smart” quotes, hopefully
>> the right ones. They're still ' and " in the underlying text, just
>> overlaid with “”.
> This is not related to entities, so code shouldn't be in org-entities.el.
Agreed.

>
> Also, quotes are dependent on locale[fn:1]. English/US only quotes look
> like a niche to me. Would it be possible to modify the patch and have
> this feature handle LANGUAGE keyword, or at least have a support for it?
Hm.  I like the idea, but it raises some questions for me.  It would be 
particularly good if this could share code/custom variables with the 
pieces of the (new) exporter that make smart quotes on export.  That way 
we could be sure that what it looks like onscreen would also be what it 
looked like when exported.  Looking at contrib/lisp/org-e-latex.el at an 
upcoming exporter for such things, I see a variable org-e-latex-quotes, 
which has nice language-aware parts... but misses an important point.  
Each language gets to define one regexp for opening quotes, one for 
closing quotes, and one for single quotes.  But don't we want to talk 
about (at least) two levels of quotes, see your own reference[fn:1]?  
Single quotes would be for inner, second-level quotes (if we're using 
double straight quotes according to (American) English usage, I would 
guess we'd be using single straight quotes the same way).  That works 
okay for English, where a single apostrophe not part of a grouping 
construct is going to be interpreted as a "close" single quote and look 
right for an apostrophe.  It might not work so good in French where 
apostrophes are also used, but also single guillemets for inner-level 
quotes.  Does the setup there need to be smarter, or at least more 
extensible, to allow for more than exactly three entries?  Clever enough 
regexps could distinguish inner quotes from apostrophes, etc.  
Should/can we consider extending this for the new exporters?

(I'm looking forward to HTML and ODT exporters that can do smart quotes; 
the straight quotes are really the main jarring things about using Org 
as a lightweight markup and exporting into something fancier)

~mark