Re: text-quoting-style

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

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.

>> (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.

> Problem 3 doesn't concern me personally

Then let's make it lower priority.

>> 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.  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.