[scribus] Automagically insert correct German quotation marks instead of manually inserting them?

[John Culleton]

On Wednesday 25 August 2010 06:19:56 a.l.e wrote:
> hi john,
>
> > Having said that, it just occurred to me that not all programs
> > handle the opening vs. closing quotes. Minimal text editors just
> > use the straight quotes. But all major programs do it correctly.
> >
> > But having said that i also realized that there are few rare
> > situations where even OOo does not do it correctly. For example,
> > there is a famous poem that starts with the contraction 'twas
> > (for "it was"). When I type 'twas I get an opening quote, but
> > that particular contraction is supposed to start with a closing
> > quote. I have to fool OOo by typing a letter, then the quote,
> > then "twas", then deleting the initial letter.
> >
> > I wonder if OOo handles the German opening and closing quotes
> > correctly, or at least as correctly as it does the English
> > opening and closing quotes. If so, could Scribus borrow the code?
>
> afaict, most of the time the choice of the scribus team is to
> implement features that always work. at least for things that are
> print relevant.
>
> you don't want to print 2000 copies of your magazine before
> noticing that somewhere your quotes are wrong!
> (you know, when you automatically apply the quotes to 5 imported
> pages you may not notice that 'twas was at the beginning of a
> paragraph...)
>
> if the "mostly correct" is certainly a good approach for a word
> processor it may not be enough for a DTP app.
>
> ciao
> a.l.e
>
> _______________________________________________
> scribus mailing list
> scribus at lists.scribus.net
> http://lists.scribus.net/mailman/listinfo/scribus

My "trick" when editing a text file (in Gvim) where the quotes are 
actually inch symbols like those I have used in this sentence is to 
search for the string: 
<space>"
 and substitute the TeX convention for opening quote, and then search 
for the string 
"<space> 
and substitute the TeX convention for a closing quote. Faced with the 
problem cited above I would use the opening or closing symbol as used 
in German. Of course this symbol would have to be in the font chosen. 

This is one of the many areas where Scribus falls short of the 
facilities found in most other text processing programs. For this 
reason I use Scribus for highly illustrated tasks like book covers and 
flyers but something else for text-heavy documents.  

As my father used to say: "There are horses for courses." It might 
work to prepare the text in Open Office and then put it into a Scribus 
text frame. Or the LaTeX exit could be used for massaging the text.
I haven't tried either of these tricks myself.  
-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
Printable E-book 38 pages $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html