From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 01:25:09 EDT
At 04:50 AM 7/22/03 +0200, Chris Jacobs wrote:
> > Where am I going with this? Basically what I'm after is a clean/clear
> > way to tell if quotation marks and parentheses (plus the other
> > bracketing characters such as '[' or '{' are opening or closing
> > punctuation. That's the real question here! How would you do that
> > using properties and categories?
>
> Basically you just cannot do that.
>An explicit counterexample given in Version 3.0 page 152 is:
>
>«French»
>»Slovenian«
>
>« can be both opening and closing.
>» can be both opening and closing.
For Swedish and similar languages that use the same identical quotation
mark for opening and closing, it's even more impossible.
A./
PS: it's not even possible to correctly do smart quotes, for the general
case, due to the fact that the apostrophe and single quotation marks use
the same character, both on keyboard input, and on smart-quote
substitution. That's something that I'm running into with Unibook, since
the Unicode nameslist is created with ASCII quotes, but is printed with
smart quotes. As the formatting does not allow user input, once the
algorithm makes a choice, the results are fixed. What makes the problem
easier is that the comment fields are short; what makes it harder is the
fact that there is a tendency to allow transcriptions of foreign words -
those have unusual placement of apostrophes.
(Also of hyphen by the way.)
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