From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jun 08 2006 - 05:41:54 CDT
Could you then please specify WHICH other character you must use for German so that it looks correct for you when you switch to Courier New or Verdana?
Then is this character correct when displayed with Times/Times NewRoman or Arial? If so, then this is the character to use always for closing quotes in German.
For now, you've not been very precise about this supposed issue.
andfor me, I see no conceptual difference between Arial and Verdana regarding any of the glyphs they display for the same quoting punctuation character.
In fact, you have not justified exactly what you considered incorrect or incorrect in the displayed glyphs, because apparently you find both the 6/9-shaped glyphs and oblique stroke glyphs as acceptable.
I have not even been able to determine which exact change you had to do in the encoding for getting the result you want.
Given that German is not a so uncommon language, I really have doubts that this issue could have been forgotten by the standard promoters (and notably by the DIN representant at ISO, and the German organisation members at Unicode.) And expert companies that work since long in typography and that are members of Unicode (like Agfa-Monotype or Adobe) would have known this problem since long.
So it's most probable that what you are revealing is a misuse of the existing characters, by people assuming that German uses the same quoting pairs as English or another language. Don't criticize Unicode, sendyour critics to those that create these incorrect documents.
This issue of choosing the appropriate quotation marks is already acknowledge, but not a problem in Unicode or ISO 10646; that's why the CLDR contains localization data for properly choosing the quotation marks.
Finally I did not assume that the 4th didactic example was existing in any language or that it did not exist. Giben that the direction andposition of quotation marks are already varying in opposite directions in various languages I just prefered not to exclude any possibility, given that I don't know all possible local conventions in the world. That's why I did not want to name those locales, and just gave the examples without commenting them.
Philippe.
----- Original Message -----
From: Keutgen, Walter
To: Philippe Verdy ; Andreas Prilop ; unicode@unicode.org
Cc: Otto Stolz
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 12:06 PM
Subject: RE: Glyphs for German quotation marks
Philippe,
As I just extended your original example of which Verdana was missing because the CSS was stripped, applying 4 fonts: Courrier New, Verdana, Arial and Times New Roman. I did this copying and pasting and I assume that this operation does not change the code points.
My original remark was not that there is an error somewhere and certainly not in a font. My original remark was - in an older email - that German quotation marks _depend_ on the font.
The 1st example in Arial and Times New Roman are correct German quotation marks. In Courier New and Verdana the closing mark is not; example 2 is correct then. This means that, _in German_, when _switching_ from the former _fonts_ to the latter ones, one must _use another character as closing quotation mark_.
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