Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
(I think I mentioned 'Smart Quotes' previously, in passing)
If I had a dime for every time someone who was having trouble getting the Regional and Language Options unattend setting to work who posted as the command line they were running something like this:
control intl.cpl,, /f:”filename.txt”
Then I'd have to worry about the tax bracket I was going to be put into....
In case you can't see the problem, it is pretty obvious if you blow up the text some:
At some point the person was looking at instructions in documentation or in email written by a copy of Outlook that has Word set as its mail editor.
It replaced the regular ASCII quotes with so-called "smart" quotes, which can turn " (U+0022, a.k.a. QUOTATION MARK) into something else such as ” (U+201d, a.k.a. RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK). Which of course the command prompt will not recognize.
Man I hate that feature. Not because it is isn't useful, because it can be. But it is not quite smart enough of a feature to know when it isn't helpful!
Anyway, colleague Gwyneth Marshall provided me with as list that some version of Office uses for quotes used in different languages:
Now if only Office 14/Word 14 can be made smart enough to detect the cases where the feature is not needed, it could save everyone a lot of grief!
We're all sick of the smartass/dumbass aspects of this particular feature.:-)
This post brought to you by ” (U+201d, a.k.a. RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK)
> I want something smarter than that, though -- because not
> everyone obsessively marks styles, especially in EMAIL
For plain text mail, just treat it as one big <pre>, no quote replacements. Yes, typographically correct quotes are important, but computers are not smart enough to detect where the conversion is or is not needed. I presume if people had “” on their keyboards they might actually learn to use them, but, unfortunately, most only have ' and ".
I have posted twice a message about the fact that the Romanian quotes are incorrect in the posted table.
It this censorship, or there is something wrong in my message?
:-)
They were auto-detected as spam, sorry....
Still about Romanian:
,O‘ is never used
„O“ is wrong, should be „O”
‹ O › is never used
« O » should be «O» (used when nested quotes are required, , i.e. „blah «blah» blah”)
I find strange the "some version of Office" statement, since AFAIK the autocorrect feature of MS Office always uses the correct official quotes (99 down / 99 up) since long time ago, even before the recent (2003) Romanian Academy clarification.
Some further references:
The shape (not the codes !) of the Romanian quotes have been clarified (not changed !) in 2003.
The official reference is this (scannd documents; intro + decision):
http://www.secarica.ro/misc/InstitLingvTastatura-20031008-1.tif (.tif, 1,81 MB)
http://www.secarica.ro/misc/InstitLingvTastatura-20031008-2.tif (.tif, 3,66 MB)
The physical written document is stored at the Institute for Cultural Memory ( http://www.cimec.ro/e_default.htm )
Additionally, some sort of tutorial on this subject can be found at the Romanain Academy's official site, on the very first page, under a link that says "Punctuaţia limbii române. I. Ghilimelele" (or direct link http://www.academiaromana.ro/com2006/doc/ghilimele.doc )
The Romanian translation for "quotes" is "ghilimele". They are described as 99 down (on opening) / 99 up (on closing). The Unicode correspondence for this description is U+201E / U+201D.
Cristi
<<They were auto-detected as spam, sorry....>>
So you decided to pass both, although they are almost identical :-)
That ALMOST bit is what did it, I did not want to have to choose....
<<That ALMOST bit is what did it, I did not want to have to choose....>>
Well, it was *almost* because I don't save the messages I submit.
So after submitting the first and did not make it, I had no way to resubmit, had to "recreate" it.
The differences where not relevant (in my mind at least :-)
Whatever, it does not matter.
Thanks.
Cristi kinda disagreed anyway, so it's all good. :-)
In the spirit of dumb quotes ! A regular reader pointed me this one.... It would seem that Word' AutoCorrect
NOTE: In addition to the wonderful lesson in this post, please keep in mind the lesson from Dumb quotes...
Please read the disclaimer ; content of Michael Kaplan's blog not approved by Microsoft! The other day
It was a bug reported to me by twitter friend Rifat Nabi...
I've talked about Word's "Smart Quotes" many times over the years, in blogs like this one and this one