More info about #228486 / #235759
[I'm not subscribed to -l10n-german]
Hello,
I've read up the bugs discussion and I'm surprised about the proposed
solution. First, let's recapitulate the drawbacks of each proposal:
a) Use english doublequotes
- the opening quote sign should be subscripted
- opening/closing are identical, this makes nested quotes hard to read
b) Use guillemots
- guillemots are very unusual in Germany (In printing I remember
only a few occurences in ~1900 vintage books, and none in
contemporary literature)
- The usual de-latin1-nodeadkeys keyboard layout hasn't even a
definition for quillemots, it can only be typed in via
AltGr+<Codepoint>. The X11 keyboard has a common definition for
all latin charsets (M-y, M-x), but this isn't marked on the
keyboard, so most people don't know how to type guillemots (and
they don't have to).
- guillemots are already in use in swiss german, but with _swapped_
semantics. This will make a confusing reading for swiss people.
c) Emulate german quotes as in ,,Foo"
- uses up two characters instead of one for the opening quote
- opening/closing has inconsistent shape with many fonts
- The colon is already in use with different semantics, this is
confusing for the reader
Starting from this, b) is probably the worst solution. I'm pretty sure
many people won't even recognize a guillemot as a quoting sign without
having more context. c) is better WRT, but the reader will stumble over
each opening quote.
So a) is IMHO the best. Granted, it doesn't do the subscript as in c),
but it gets the shape right, and the shape of a character is more
important than the position for easy reading. The nested quotes problem
can probably be neglected, as nesting of quotes is rather uncommon.
The last drawback for any change is that it will AFAICS be a long-term
deviation from upstream glibc. I believe upstream had already made the
decision to stay with c) until utf-8 is found everywhere.
Thiemo
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