> So if two glyphs have enough "visual character" to be used in one
> document to express two different meanings, then they should be
> encoded as different characters?
Yes, more or less. However, quotation characters need language
tagging or something like that; you certainly don't want to have the
sitation to ask whether ' is the Byzantine opening quote, or ' the
Martian alternate closing quote, or ' the you-name-it. It's a
delicate issue.
>> Whether a certain character is `opening' or `closing' is a meta
>> information, usually depending on the language (or the country, or
>> the writing direction, or...), to be provided by a higher level.
>
> Does it work at all? Why not specify "ISO-..." for each piece of text
> (sequence of bytes) of a document on that level? Specifying information
> above the encoding makes the "traditional" encodings perfectly
> compatible with each other.
You don't want to reinvent ISO-2022...
> When writing an article in English about German language should one
> have to switch the font for each piece of German text containing
> quotation marks?
This is not necessary, but...
> or change the locale settings for each piece?
... this is necessary for correct microtypography.
> or issue some variation selection for each piece, so the font can
> pick the best glyph?
This is another possibility, yes. For example, the `babel' package in
LaTeX works like this. Also related are the following two package
documentation files:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/csquotes/csquotes.pdf
http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc/latex/csquotes-de/csquotes-DE.pdf
The latter is a German translation of the former.
Typographically correct quotation is a quite difficult topic.
Werner
Received on Wed May 02 2012 - 15:30:49 CDT
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