Subject: Re: bug#13131: 24.1; Allow curly quotes to be found by searching for straight quotes?

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:20:32 +0000

On 10 December 2012 08:28, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
> We should begin by discussing whether we really want this feature, by
> default or otherwise.  One of the aspects we need to consider, IMO, is
> what do spell-checkers do with these characters: if they don't treat
> them as word-constituents, that would be one argument against the
> change; if they do, it's an argument for the change.
>

At least aspell now seems to accept curly quotes by default in some locales.

However,  I think the rationale for the feature is independent of
spell-checkers. Emacs has had support for displaying curly quotes for some
time. There are various ways to enter them conveniently (the Emacs Wiki
lists smart-quotes.el, which I use, and typopunct.el. The sole author of
smart-quotes.el would be quite happy to assign copyright to GNU and have it
added to Emacs; I suggested he contact the maintainers about this in August
2011. (Incidentally, I'd be happy to facilitate the process if Emacs
maintainers were interested.)

Since curly quotes make perfect sense as part of words, in exactly the same
way as straight quotes, it seems reasonable to treat them the same for
movement, even if spelling support is not yet perfect; indeed, any
additional incentive to spelling program authors to improve Unicode
punctuation support is welcome.

For writing text, the introduction of Unicode has been a boon, and it would
be great if Emacs's "semantic" support would catch up with its excellent
display support. This is one aspect of that.

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