John Culleton wrote:

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I use slackware linux 14, the 64 bit version. What is the proper code for opening quotes in context?

Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

Use “quoted word” or \quotation{quoted word}.

Since you're using Linux: if you set your keyboard layout to `English (international AltGr dead keys)`, your keyboard will behave like an ordinary US keyboard, but you can use AltGr (right Alt) to get special characters. Specifically, you can get ‘’ with AltGr + 9 and AltGr + 0 “” with AltGr + { and AltGr + } «» with AltGr + [ and AltGr + ] That might make the quotations easier to type, if you decide to input them “literally” instead of \quotation{structurally}. The AltGr dead keys keyboard is very nice in general, not least because it is indistinguishable from a normal US keyboard under normal usage. Cheers, Sietse

Am 24.07.2013 um 16:58 schrieb David Rogers :

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.

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

Am 27.07.2013 um 16:29 schrieb john Culleton :

I think I will encapsulate the "\quotation" method in a macro like \def\qq{\\quotation\{} or similar. Two keystrokes are better than nine.

Use \delimitedtext[qq][quotation] to create a new quote command.

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?

You’re wrong the output of '' looks correct but it isn’t as you can see in the following example. When you write ' context replaces it with ’ which is together with -- and --- one of the remaining fake ligatures which can be enabled with the “tlig=yes” in \definefontfeature. \starttext \type{''} = '' \type{”} = ” \stoptext

Not every change is an improvement, IMO.

One could misuse the translate module for this but I really suggest to move forward and use direct input of “ and ” or \quotation{…}. \usemodule[translate] \translateinput[``][“] \translateinput[''][”] \enableinputtranslation \starttext ``text'' \stoptext Wolfgang

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

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I note that the plain TeX version of closing quotes, '' still works.

It doesn't. You get two apostrophes (which usually happen to look like a double quotation mark).

I need to add that converting character 27 (') into apostrophe was considered a crucial functionality, so it was kept. Nobody can imagine getting the proper apostrophe on keyboard and its use is very common. On the other hand many languages use different quotation marks and using ``these'' is completely "americanocentric". On top, auto-replacement lead to inability to typeset the actual backtick (`) when it's needed. So yes, getting rid of `` replaced by quotation by default *was* an improvement. If you are worried about the number of strokes you can always configure your keyboard to give the quotation marks by pressing alt-gr+something (an equivalent effort of typing an uppercase letter). Or you can define \def\q#1{\quotation{#1}} The big advantage of \quotation{...} is that it automatically gives you the right quotation marks for the active language. And for me it's also convenient that I can easily switch which quotation marks are used (both guilemets and "double comma-style" are allowed in our grammar, and I sometimes change my mind about which ones should be used in the middle of the project). Or I could change the quoted text to become italic. Mojca PS: I'm sometimes mad at what TeX did. Every (La)TeX user read a (La)TeX tutorial at some point and nowadays probably 80% users in my country still use "\v{c}" (not being aware that they could type the Unicode characters the same way as they do in Word), either the wrong font encoding (OT1; without proper hyphenation and with weirdly composed glyphs) or the bitmap fonts, and the grammatically incorrect version of ``quotes''. This is what they learnt from manuals. In ConTeXt UTF-8 just works and \quotation{...} is a lot better than those weird ``artefacts''.