Hello,
On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 01:36:08PM +0200, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> a) Use english doublequotes
> - the opening quote sign should be subscripted
> - opening/closing are identical, this makes nested quotes hard to read
The first is IMHO a "pleasant to read" (e.g., in Newspapers) and as
you stated the second one is seldom.
> 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)
This has already been discussed. And one of the large desktop
environments has already decided to use »« as well.
> - 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).
Well, to be honest, for many people using the quote signs is not a
daily task, if they need, they use a Type Setting Environment (e.g.,
LaTeX, OpenOffice.org etc.) which brings in its own facility for
typsetting those characters. We are mainly taking about low level
interaction done by glibc, and this is usually output only. (As I
understand, it is not possible to use local quotes for quoting e.g.
patterns from shell expansion, hence there " remains its meaning, even
if german local is in use, but please correct me if I am wrong.)
> - guillemots are already in use in swiss german, but with _swapped_
> semantics. This will make a confusing reading for swiss people.
Unfortunately there has not been a Swiss person stating the impact of
this proposed change, although, e.g., on the Debian Web Pages
guillemots are already used quite a while.
IMHO c) is the worst, so replacing it by a) is fine with me.
Greetings
Helge
--
Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de
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