GNU bug report logs -
#20385
Support curved quotes in doc strings
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Reported by: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:40:04 UTC
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
Done: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
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Message #229 received at 20385 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):
On 05/14/2015 06:24 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> The main motivation is that English text shouldn't use grave accent to
> quote. It looked good decades ago but the underlying encodings changed
> and now it is klunky and offputting. (It's not as bad as the 1950s
> syntax 16HTHIS IS A STRING but that's a low bar....) Yes, it was a GNU
> tradition for many years, but other GNU packages (GCC, coreutils, etc.)
> have largely shifted away from it and it's time Emacs made it more
> convenient to use the more-standard convention of curved quotes.
The other GNU packages have transitioned to using the straight
apostrophes though, didn't they?
> I haven't tried font locking. As I understand it, though, font locking
> would address the problem only in doc strings. For example, it wouldn't
> address Emacs's diagnostic messages, which also need to get fixed. In
> contrast, the sorts of solutions I'm proposing should help support
> curved quotes nearly everywhere.
The diagnostic messages can be treated differently (use fancy quotes,
since we know this text will appear to the user as-is), or whatever code
outputs diagnostics could convert the ASCII quotes to the fancy ones
on-the-fly.
> The patch proposed in Bug#20545 largely addresses this problem.
> Contributors can use the same keypresses as before. If your
> contributors type this:
Ah, sorry, that's better. I was under the impression, from a related
discussion, that we'll need to type something like `C-x 8 ''.
> I reproduced that problem in Thunderbird by visiting "View > Character
> Encoding > Auto-Detect" and selecting "Russian". To fix it, I selected
> "(off)" instead of "Russian".
Thank you. Indeed, that is it. As a Russian speaker, though, I'm not
going to turn it off.
This bug report was last modified 9 years and 364 days ago.
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