From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Emanuel Berg Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Getting Emacs to play nice with Hunspell and apostrophes Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:14:45 +0200 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: <8761k3vj2y.fsf@debian.uxu> References: <87ha3s71mt.fsf@debian.uxu> <87tx7rsevi.fsf@debian.uxu> <8738fbscao.fsf@debian.uxu> <8738f8w988.fsf@debian.uxu> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1402744526 3794 80.91.229.3 (14 Jun 2014 11:15:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:15:26 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Jun 14 13:15:21 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1WvlvZ-0005Aq-Us for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sat, 14 Jun 2014 13:15:18 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:34911 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WvlvZ-0005wT-Go for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sat, 14 Jun 2014 07:15:17 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!newsgate.cistron.nl!newsgate.news.xs4all.nl!194.109.133.86.MISMATCH!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!newsfeed3.news.xs4all.nl!xs4all!news.stack.nl!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 159 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: SIvZRMPqRkkTHAHL6NkRuw.user.speranza.aioe.org Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Cancel-Lock: sha1:O5oWm3qy1k02L63vq8MFmRkJHow= Mail-Copies-To: never Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:205975 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:98245 Archived-At: Yuri Khan writes: >> The “ and ’ just looks silly and they are >> disruptive. The two chars after the words "such as" >> I cannot see (they are shown as diamonds). > > This is where I disagree. Curly quotes (and, in > Russian print tradition, double angle quotes) are > what I am used to seeing in print and consider to be > the correct way to write OK, I believe you. However, the point I made with all people coming from different cultures is that it doesn't matter where we are from individually. When I went to school, I suppose I was most comfortable with Swedish. But I'm not supposing we all switch to Swedish! OK, that's a ridiculous example as it is extreme, while what we discuss now is perhaps trivial (' or ’) - but in principle it is the same. The computer language is English, and as I showed - the man pages for ls and emacs, as well as the RFC excerpt, as well as all experience with mails and Usenet and programming culture - all show that in "Computer English", ' (not ’) is correct. In a sense, this language is something that even the US, UK, etc. people have to acquire, though in another way altogether, of course. You see, kernel, allocation, dynamic, data structure, heap, process, deadlock, etc. are all English words. But put together a sentence and show it to a surfer in Southern California. You know what I'm saying? (By the way, do you know what they call a guy in Southern California who is interested in cars? Well, a "sensitive intellectual" :)) - now, the Scots and Irish are of course not calling their variables McDigit or O'String, but do they write , DialogueBox, background-colour, and so on? No - in Computer English it is
, DialogBox, and background-color, just as it is ', not ’. > independent of the medium There is no such independence. There are computers. > Straight quotes I recognize in both print and on > screen as a no longer necessary homage to the old > clunky typewriter, and perceive as silly. They are not homages to anything - they exist. It is of course interesting to know why they are there but as for as for this discussion it doesn't matter. What matters is that they are there, they exist. > As for your problems seeing curly quotes, that’s > because of your display engine. Yes, another reason why not to use them. > Text mode Linux console is limited to at most 512 > character shapes; this limitation dates back to the > original VGA card and is another one that should no > longer affect us. Nowadays, you should be able to use > a graphical-based text renderer — be it X11 or > framebuffer. Myself, I haven’t bothered to set up a > framebuffer console on any of my computers — I prefer > working in an X11 environment with Freetype-rendered, > subpixel-antialiased Unicode fonts and rich xkb > customizability. The Linux console is faster with text than Emacs running in for example xterm. I could get a faster computer hypothetically but then I'd also have to spend hours getting the keyboard and fonts and everything as I want them. But I already have that, so why do it? But I don't think the console is that much "better" than X/xterm in general - just in my case with all the configuration, I'm very happy with that and see no reason to do it again in X. And certainly not for this reason... > By encoding more precise character semantics into our > texts, we make them better suited for any kind of > automated processing. Conflating similarly shaped > characters, on the other hand, makes it more > complicated. > > For example, the task of producing nice printouts > from an ASCII-encoded source requires a complex piece > of software like [La]TeX, or the mechanism of entity > references in HTML (“). On the other hand, with > UTF-8, we can directly encode the desired characters > in a text document and print it out with any text > editor or web browser. > > (You can, of course, argue that a printout of an > ASCII document with straight quotes is not too ugly; > or that TeX is not exceedingly complex; or that > entity references are not very disrupting.) ASCII doesn't look ugly printed, it looks the same as it does on computers. But the main propose of ASCII of course isn't to be printed but to be processed and crunched... and read (on computers). I can't say I have that much respect for HTML as a technical system but yes, I think ' should be used, both when typing and in presentation - where the material will be read in a browser (i.e., a computer program) and sometimes yanked to a mail or post or configuration file. LaTeX is indeed complex but it is for a good reason - so there won't be any limitations creating complex documents. When you print LaTeX I don't really care what the chars look like because with LaTeX you typically print ambitious documents of several pages so then you get into the flow when reading, so you stop thinking about the chars really fast. However, every code/configuration file snippet, man page quote and so on should use '. Also, when you write LaTeX, only ' (and the like) should be used just as is the case for programming, HTML, and all other computer writing and programming. But after that, when a PDF has been created, that is sort of beyond the dynamic world of computers and more into the book world - there, I don't see any real benefits of using either ' or ’. However, since it doesn't really matter, why not stick to ' as it is the de facto standard? >> OK, let me tell you how I do ' and ". ' I do by >> moving my right little finger one step (key) to the >> right. The " I do by moving the right little finger >> to the right shift, at the same time as the ring >> finger slides along to the ' key. > > Now let me tell you how I do curly quotes. > > First, with my right thumb, I hold the AltGr > modifier. Then, I press k and l in sequence to get a > balanced pair of double curly quotes, or ; and ' for > single quotes (I customized my xkb configuration > files to get this but it works similarly with the > out-of-the-box config). This works for me in both > Latin/English and Cyrillic/Russian layouts. On the > other hand, the straight quote is only available in > the Latin layout; in Russian, I would have to first > switch to Latin, then type the single quote, and > finally switch back to Russian. Yes, but when you program and write in English (like now), don't you use the US keyboard layout? That's what I do to get the brackets and the semicolon and all that with no fuss - it is not that I use the Swedish chars that much, anyway! (Which is again the whole point.) And with the US layout, ' (and so on) are easier to type than the chars you suggest. -- underground experts united: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573