Re: [bug-gnulib] Re: quoting in gnulib

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Maybe you could improve the handling when the translator didn't provide
> a translation? if (translation == msgid)...
> Currently the code returns
>
>    (s == clocale_quoting_style ? "\"" : "`" or "'")
>
> If you improved this to test the locale_charset () for being "UTF-8",
> users would see the UTF-8 quotation marks even if translators didn't help.

But then the problem is that there is no universal standard for UTF-8
quotation marks either.  I could use American English double quotes,
for example, but they will be just as unsuitable for (say) German.
Perhaps it's best to stick with ` and ', since they are ugly in all
languages and they are the most portable.

> (Similar to what you did for the (C) sign years ago.)

I remember that.  I had enough problems with "(C)" that I gave up on
that approach.  It wasn't worth the hassle.  Now I let the translators
do it, with at-best middling results.

Here's an amusing story about this.  I just now visited the web page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_marks_in_English>
which is a nice summary of common problems with quotation marks.  I am
using the latest release of Debian GNU/Linux (3.1, released only last
month), and one of the most widely used browsers (Firefox 1.0.4 as
maintained by Debian).  But I can't read all the characters in that
web page telling me how to quote things for the English language!
Some of the characters in that section are missing in my installation,
so, for example, U+201B (HTML: &#8219;) comes out as a splotch on my
screen.