From: Curtis Clark (jcclark-lists@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 23:53:10 CST
on 2005-03-03 12:11 Peter Kirk wrote:
> Actually, no, because this kind of context is a very poor guide in such
> a case. Documents which have been edited by many different people could
> very easily contain a mixture of hyphen/minus and hyphen, even when the
> intended interpretation is always hyphen - especially because in this
> case there is no visual distinction at all.
[...]
> This situation is of course a hypothetical one.
A real situation involves U+0022 ("), U+201C (“), and U+201D (”), all of
which look the same in the Lucida Console I am using right now, and in
many other fonts. I'm always running into text edited by multiple
authors where all of these are present, the result of Microsoft Word
doing "smart quotes", some people turning that off, and others using
different editors. And this isn't even a case of intentional disambiguation.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona +1 909 979 6371 Professor, Biological Sciences +1 909 869 4062
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