Subject: Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 15:14:53 CDT
On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, sam th wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, WJCarpenter wrote:
>
> > sam> MS Word Smart Quotes are just on the fly character replacement,
> > sam> which isn't that clever. If we did it this way, I think it would
> > sam> really be 'Smart'.
> >
> > If by that you mean that MSWord just does the equivalent of
> > remapGlyphs but really leaves your original ASCII quote marks in your
> > document, then I think you've got it wrong. If that were true, there
> > would probably be nobody working on smart quotes for Abi. The main
> > source of them today is imports from MSWord, in which they are
> > persistent.
> >
> > If you meant something else, I think I'm missing your point (about
> > MSWord), so please elaborate.
>
> I did mean something else. I think that the remapGlyphs stuff does
> qulaify as smart (which is why the rot13 trick works). What MSWord does
> is just redirect the keypress to the insertCurlyQuoteChar() function
> instead of insertBoringQuoteChar() function. With a little logic for
> opening and closing quotes, that's basically it.
>
> What we could do is have the glyphs remapped in memory to smart quotes,
> but stored in the .abw file as normal quotes. This would have the
> benifits I outlined earlier.
While interesting, I think that you would need to have
some state knowledge that you would have to maintain
between calls to the remapGlyphs code. This state information
would be a pain to have to maintain, and I'm almost
certain that doing so would introduce some very subtle
bugs.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
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