discuss: Quoting styles in documents.
Subject:
Re: Quoting styles in documents.
From:
"Jukka Aho" ####@####.####
Date:
8 Feb 2003 13:06:49 -0000
Message-Id: <024c01c2cf72$7a3a7cf0$c7c38e3e@ronsu>
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:
> I have seen people use several quoting styles when they write
> documents, "like this", `some like this', ``a few like this''
> and 'probably like this'. What is the rationale behind using
> these styles? is this just a personal preference or is there
> something else behind this?
There are many separate issues at work here.
1) Different countries and languages have different quoting
styles - and may even use a totally different set of quoting
characters altogether.
2) Very often authors are not all that familiar even with
the typographical conventions and recommendations in force
in their own language, not to mention when writing in a
foreign language.
3) Not all character sets have all the quoting characters
in them.
4) Not all authoring tools support the character sets you
would need to be able to use to produce correct quoting.
5) Not all fonts have glyphs for all characters in all
character sets.
6) Many authors do not know how to produce characters
that are not readily available on their keyboards - or
how to produce them correctly for the tool they use.
7) Authors do not bother to learn how to do the above.
8) Some authors may resort to ``clever'' styles, feeling
that they have resolved the problem by doing so - without
realizing that they only made things worse with gimmicks
like that. (This is akin to the practice of trying to mark
up "headings" in HTML with the <font> tag.)
> What is the prefered way of doing it?
It depends on the tools you use and on the language you write
in, but the bottom line is that if you (and your toolchain)
can use the full UNICODE character set, by all means use it:
you should have all the "real" quoting characters you ever
need right at your fingertips. After having familiarized
oneself with the correct typographical quoting characters
present in UNICODE, it would be just foolish to ever again
resort to ``pseudo-smart'' quotes (which should be avoided,
anyway - it's a bad idea) or "ASCII" quotes within normal text.
There is a fairly good introductory article to these matters
here: <http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/> (see the part
with the subheading "Don't Misquote Me".)
You might also want to read
<http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/dashes.html> and
<http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html>.
--
Jukka Aho +358 6 317 4282
Konepajakatu 9 Q 48 +358 50 349 8812 IRCNet:znark
FIN-65100 Vaasa ####@####.#### http://www.iki.fi/znark/
