[Scribus] german quotation marks

[ephemeron]

On 17. December 2003 at 4:33PM +0100,
Craig Bradney <cbradney at zip.com.au> wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 14:33, dave wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 01:17 PM, Craig Bradney
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 12:43, John Christian Stoddart wrote:
> > >
> > > > hardwiring the quote system to the language
> > >
> > > Wouldnt it make more sense for normal typing to use the
> > > default for the language, and those "irrational" graphic
> > > designers to use the "Insert Special" option?
> > >
> > IMHO it would make most sense to be a preference default, and
> > not a *hardwired* default, which is what I think John was
> > saying :)
> > 
> > So a graphic designer has the ability to change the default,
> > in addition to the "Insert Special" option, and gets the best
> > of both worlds, while most people are just served up the
> > default and think 'Oh, thats neat' :)
> 
> Then you would have to have a preferences dialog for all
> languages, giving quoting (and possibly other) character
> definitions. Im not saying this isnt possible..

Rather than have the user mind the language, I think it's better
simply to have a simple character substitution table similar to
the one implemented for missing fonts, something like:

CHARACTER SEQUENCE    REPLACEMENT

--                    <em-dash>
                      (or <en-dash> if typeface is too "fat")
<space>"<letter>      <space><left-double-quote><letter>
<letter>'<letter>     <letter><right-single-quote><letter>

A simple regex seach-and-replace function will be a reasonable
substitute.

> Anyway.. will discuss it with Franz more tonight on IRC.

Typographical quotes can be inserted interactively, via
"autocorrection", or noninteractively, when the text is
"preformatted" before being imported into the document.
Autocorrection is a standard feature of bloated word processors
like OpenOffice and MS Word.  I don't know if they can autoformat
a newly opened document that doesn't already contain
typographical quotes.  But this isn't too much of a lack since
this can be done semi-automatically via search-and-replace.

Both ways of placing typographical quotes should prove useful, if
let's say, I do most of my typing in Emacs (the body text) but
would rather do my headlines, captions or callouts in Scribus.