GNU bug report logs -
#20385
Support curved quotes in doc strings
Previous Next
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.
Full log
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 10 years and 52 days ago.
Previous Next
GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham,
1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd,
1994-97 Ian Jackson.