From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Mar 27 2005 - 15:33:54 CST
De : "Patrick Andries"
> Philippe VERDY a écrit :
> > "Patrick Andries" wrote:
> > > The same could be said of the apostrophe in French : not the ASCII value
> > > (U+0027) but U+2019 is what should be used if Unicode capability is
> > > available. Reality is there are a lot of pages with U+0027 (unfortunately).
> >
> > Don't say what apostrophe should be.
>
> Is this an order ?
Why do you think that? It's just a bad translation to English of a French idiom which here meant "il n'est guère utile de dire".
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf
> U+0027 : 2019 is preferred for apostrophe.
Fine suggestion if a text will be typesetted, because it will enforce all quotes to adopt the apostrophe glyph when they are (most often) true apostrophes.
> > What prevails here is the fact that national *standard* keyboards
> > (in France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, ... but also for English
> > in US and UK) simply don't have a key for this apostrophe, and just
> > generate a simple ASCII single quote.
>
> You don't say !
So what? Are you suggesting that the French keyboards should be updated to generate a true apostrophe when striking the [4 ' { ] key, so that most texts will now contain the correct character? Why isn't there any apostrophe in ISO-8859-1, or in Windows1252, or in the revized ISO-8859-15?
OK this would have allowed easier distinction, at the price of forcing users to enter a complexe keystroke with AltGr when the ASCII quote was needed as a string/character delimiter (mostly for programming), or another complex keystroke to get the rounded punctuation quotes (present in Windows-1252 but not in ISO-8859-15).
Then what do you do with the ASCII backquote? Is it ambiguous too?
OK in Windows XP today, it's really easy to have several keymaps at the same time with the same keyboard layout: one for typographic usage (which could be the default when composing texts, where the [4'{] key would compose an apostrophe), and another for programming (with ASCII characters)...
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