Re: Quotation marks: Using “” instead of ""

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

O/H Pat Suwalski έγραψε:
> My objection may seem silly, but since there is no way to type it on any 
> keyboard out there, that's a bit of a hindrance. Short of using the 
> character map and searching, one has to resolve to using "smart 
> substitution" editors like OpenOffice to get the characters.
>   
The following keyboard layouts allow you to type those double quote marks:

al ba be br by ca ch cz de dk ee epo es fi fo fr gb hr hu ie is it latam 
lt lv mao me mk mn mt nl no pl pt ro rs se si sk tr ua us za

Layouts that are missing from above may not need them (for example, gr, 
which uses «»).

An issue is with some default layouts that may not enable those double 
quotes (you have to pick the appropriate layout variant). That is the 
case with “us”, where the default layout does not include the said 
characters.

In most layouts (such as the default for GB), “” are found when you 
press AltGr+v, AltGr+b.
For US, you need to pick the “intl” variant, and here it follows its 
own, with AltGr+[, AltGr+] respectively.
> They also tend to fail horribly when pasting into a non-Unicode 
> terminal, which is still often the case over SSH. Probably not a huge 
> desktop consideration, though. Every distribution I know of uses Unicode 
> by default on the local terminal at this point.
>   
This situation (whether to put “” or not) is similar to whether to 
include ellipsis in translation messages instead of “...”. I am not sure 
what was the resolution for that issue.

The two issues have similarities and an important difference; the text 
of the menu items cannot be copied by default (unless an accessibility 
application is active), which means that the text will probably not make 
it out of the application.

I think the most important question to answer is whether we want to make 
POT files non-ASCII. That is, once messages have “”‘’, etc, then GNOME 
will be available for Unicode locales only.
If one starts GNOME with a C or a legacy 8-bit locale, it will not work.

Personally I would say no to “” at this stage.

Simos
> --Pat
>
> Christian Neumair wrote:
>   
> > Alex Jones proposed [1] to change the quotation marks in Nautilus
> > strings from the ASCII representation "..." to the unicode variant
> > “...”.
> >
> > I think the proposed quotation marks are aesthetically more pleasing,
> > but I don't want to change this unless there is a GNOME-wide policy.
> >
> > I hereby propose to establish a GNOME policy of using “...” for
> > quotations. Comments, objections?
> >
> > best regards,
> >  Christian Neumair
> >
> > [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532777
> >
> >