On 1/23/06, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
Hi all,
this seems to be a general TeX-problem, not ConTeXt specific, but I'm not sure I understand the details. Here's the problem: when I use mainlanguage[de], I can type "` to get German opening quotes, \quotedblbase „. However, this characters needs some (a lot of) kerning when it comes before, e.g., W or V; it is too far away from the following character. Most font-designers don't care about German typography, so I tried and added the kerning manually. But this works only if I input the character directly via the keyboard or via the symbolic name, it does not work with "` (nor with \quotation{ }); language German seems to make the ` active. In emacs, I find "` the most convenient way to input German quotes. Is there a way to have kerning with this input, or do I have to change my habits?
On the transferred page: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Wishes_for_Latin_Modern there are already kerning issues listed. If the problem on that page is not expressed clearly enough (and if the proposal is not OK), add your comments to that page. I agree that kerning "German" style of quotation marks was (and perhaps still is?) horrible, perhaps slightly better in LM than it was in CM. We use them as well (to be honest - 95% of LaTeX-people uses the wrong ones). I use \quotation because of these reasons: - I never know which is the proper command to get the desired quotation marks with combination of ", `, ', ... - I trust Hans that the macro is optimized in such a way that the hyphenation and everything else on the word boundary will be OK (although I'm not sure what happens to kerning) - I can simply redefine the quotation marks or the style of text to be used, for example it's easy to replace them by guillemet/guillemot alternative if necessary It might be a personal decision which ones one uses, but I would say that using "` vs. \quotation is approximately the same as using \"{a} vs ä. All of them work, but the second variant is somewhat cleaner. Mojca