Quoting MJ Ray (mjr@phonecoop.coop):
> Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> > This has been discussed on dle and we finally settled that the use of
> > single quote is what's the closest to the official English
> > typography's quotes. [...]
>
> I was not part of that discussion. What subject was that under?
Frankly speaking, I can't tell. This happened during the first
reviews. Justin or James may remember and they probably have better
arguments than mine.
> I found a small mention of it in Bug #426491 and some discussion in
> ocsinventory-agent's 2007-04-* thread, but nothing about a supposed
> official English typography. I'm *very* suspicious of things claiming
> official English status - we don't have an Academie Anglaise and that
> tactic seems similar to Death By Dictionary. Standards by different
Actually, for French, the typography reference is more the French
"Imprimerie Nationale", ie the official French governement printing
services that publishes all official publications. Its ruleset is
accepteed among most french-speaking countries.
I'd suggest seeking for similar organisms, either from UK or USA and
cross fingers for them to apply the same ruleset...:)
> people simply do different things about quotation marks (compare
> Fowler, Strunk, Columbia, Wired), as do various historic publications
> (compare Shakespeare with the Bible).
>
> FWIW, I have a fairly stong preference for ""s instead of ''s when
> there's no computing or nesting reason not to.
I personnally tend to use double quotes rather than single ones. See
above..:-). Even with French, when I'm just writing mails, I don't
really use our official « quotes ». However, I use them in formal
writings.
The sources I found (and IIRC the discussion we had) mention that
British English uses LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2018), and RIGHT
SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019). American English is said to use the
same but double quotation marks (U+201C, and U+201D) are used for
first level quotations.
As we have "agreed" to follow American English conventions, that maybe
means we should use double quotation marks. I'd still recommend to use
the simple ones (") and not U+201C and U+201D as this would lead with
problems with debconf templates i18n (gettext complains when non ASCII
is used in msgid as it wrongly assumes that English does not use
anything but plain ASCII).
It is still time to change our mind.
We will probably leave already rewritten templates but we should now
settle for something.
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