Re: apostrophes

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed May 24 2006 - 13:11:35 CDT

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    On 5/24/2006 9:45 AM, Keutgen, Walter wrote:
    > 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.
    >
    To be useful, the CLDR requires detailed and in-depth knowledge of the
    facts, which only research can give you.
    > 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.
    >
    This is an oversimplification. Unicode does *not* encode the generic
    concept of opening and closing inner and outer quotes, but the specific
    characters that are used in various traditions. The use of left/right in
    the character names (corresponding to opening/closing in the earlier
    Unicode 1.0 names) are somewhat unfortunate in this respect. (They are,
    of course, a side effect of the cultural bias of the initial group of
    standardizers, but that's not the point here).

    A font that's imaging the double quote or >> for 2019 is simply
    non-compliant.

    Any data captured in CLDR must be in terms of coded characters and
    sequences.
    > 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.
    >
    If this is true, it's probably worth looking into.
    A./
    >



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