Re: [NTG-context] Opening quotes problem with context.

On Wed, 24 Jul 2013 18:13:18 +0200 Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

Am 24.07.2013 um 16:58 schrieb David Rogers :

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john Culleton writes:

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Did a fresh install of context etc. from the context site. I used this test file: ------------------------------- \starttext ``Hello world.'' And ``Goodbye world.'' \stoptext %\bye ----------------------------------------- The resulting pdf shows two left tick marks for opening quotes but the closing quotes are proper curly quotes.

If I modify the file as follows: ------------------------------- %\starttext ``Hello world.'' And ``Goodbye world.'' %\stoptext \bye --------------------------- and use luatex or pdftex from texlive the quotes are OK.

I got similar results from context in texlive 2012 and texlive 2013.

What is the proper code for opening quotes in context?

The "truly proper" code is \quotation{Hello world.} - that style is guaranteed to work. (And, for instance, if you change context's language to French, then \quotation{Bonjour monde.} will automatically give you the correct style of French quotation marks without having to look up how to type them; likewise for other languages.)

There is nothing wrong by using „ “ ” « » etc. for quotations. When you use \quotation etc. you don’t have to bother about the correct marks for your language (you can also change them) but the code is easier to read when you use the real signs.

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I think the problem of the two left tick marks may come from web browser copy-and-paste. Special marks, especially the quotation marks, apostrophes, and tick marks, are often mangled when converting to and from HTML. When copying any program's code from a web page, watch out for those marks, they've probably been mis-transcribed by the too-clever HTML rendering.

What John wrote is valid in plain TeX where fonts replaced `` and '' with the proper characters in MkIV this feature was dropped because you can use \quotation or write the characters in your text.

Wolfgang _

Understood. But when dealing with fiction with many quotations this is a lot of extra keying with no corresponding benefit. And writing the actual characters in one's text is not all that easy either. The original plain TeX method is not dependent on a particular keyboard or the use of dead keys etc. I think I will encapsulate the "\quotation" method in a macro like \def\qq{\\quotation\{} or similar. Two keystrokes are better than nine. I note that the plain TeX version of closing quotes, '' still works. Would it be that hard to make the opening quotes of `` still work? Not every change is an improvement, IMO. John Culleton