From: Keutgen, Walter (walter.keutgen@be.unisys.com)
Date: Wed May 24 2006 - 11:45:03 CDT
Asmus,
the situation is even worse. My impression is that the German quotation marks will vary depending on the FONT. I want to write an answer in this forum, but the more statements I see passing, the more I realize that this requires a thorough verification of the whole discussion in this forum and looking at books, as you did.
The result is that the distinction between glyph and character once again is not so easy as that and having code points like 'opening quotation mark' and 'closing quotation mark' is not an option, as language tagging would be necessary for choosing the actual glyph. While this is indeed the spirit of UNICODE, my observation, if true, endangers somehow the CLDR.
There seems to be that 'problem' also in CLDR date and number formats. Whilst I was too late for changing anything, I realized that in the existing formats there are 'unexplainable' variations (in several languages visited) with an added space or not. I believe it is only a FONT effect i.e. the past contributors used some a proportional, some an even-spaced font. I.e. specially in Arial which is a rather narrow font, adding a space enhances readability, whereas in Courier the result looks perhaps ridiculous to some tastes.
Best regards
Walter Keutgen
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-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Asmus Freytag
Sent: Wednesday, 24 May 2006 17:59
To: Otto Stolz
Cc: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: apostrophes
On 5/24/2006 2:37 AM, Otto Stolz wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> I have never seen any norm or recommendation on it for any language.
>
> For German, it is in §95 of the official orthographic rules,
> <http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/regeln2006.pdf>.
>
> I am not sure whether I have said this already on the list,
> or only privately; so here it is again. Sorry, if you have
> read it twice.
>
Even reading it twice, it doesn't cover book usage. Publishers in German
have been using both the double quotation marks as stated in the official
norm, as well as the >>guillemets<< (inward pointing, no space).
[I double checked this with two random books on my bookshelf - the
first had the 'official' style, the second use the guillemets.]
The myopic nature of official regulations like these (and the situation
is not
limited to Germany) is one of the reasons that CLDR is so necessary:
Only a collective research project focused on actually observed usage
can succeed in mapping the use of these characters.
A./
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