Re: text-quoting-style

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 02:29:08PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 08/31/2015 01:13 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:29:27PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> >> (1) is fixed by using display tables to display curved quotes in grave style.
> >> (This has already been implemented and no change should be needed here.)
> > No good.  Having different characters displayed from what's in the
> > buffer is a recipe for confusion, frustration, and anger.

> It's what Emacs does now, and it works well enough.  And the basic idea 
> isn't a new principle: Emacs has done it for decades for many ASCII 
> characters, e.g., HT.  So it is not a problem in practice.

It will be a problem in practice.  It will by lying about what character
in the buffer the glyph on the screen represents.  It will be ambiguous:
seeing a ' on the screen leaves it doubtful what the corresponding
character in the buffer is.  Current uses of display tables aren't used
to confuse users.

> >> (2) is fixed by enabling character-fold-search.  This isn't the default yet, due
> >> to a few problems with its implementation, but these should be fixable.
> > No it isn't.  character-fold-search violates the KISS principle,
> > certainly for me personally.

> We could implement it so that it would be quite simple: you search for 
> what you see.  That should be good enough.

Providing what I see is what is there, yes.

> > Problem 3 doesn't concern me personally

> Then let's make it lower priority.

But don't forget people who will be cutting and pasting with tools like
gpm.

> >> This alternative would be superior to what we have now, because it would also
> >> work for info files (which aren't handled by Emacs's current scheme).
> > What's wrong with `text-quoting-style'?

> As I wrote, text-quoting-style doesn't do anything for info files, or 
> for other text files containing curved quotes.

That's an argument for an additional facility for Info, not one for
getting rid of `text-quoting-style', unless the replacement can do the
job of `text-quoting-style'.

> The approach I'm proposing would work for these other cases too, and
> it would avoid the heavy use of translation that Stefan has expressed
> concern about.

I'm not quite up to date with the status of these things.  But I'll be
quite happy if the following hold:
(i) Quotes, apostrophes, and so on, in all our sources will continue to
  be ASCII.
(ii) Emacs can be configured such that the quotes in help buffers,
  messages, etc. are ASCII quotes.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).