[bug] Smart quotes: confusion of apostrophe with second level quotes

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi,

I don't know if this is a known issue, but I haven't been able to find
any mention of it. I think this is partly because in English it can go
perfectly unnoticed, since for English the values of secondary-closing
and apostrophe are identical:

  (secondary-closing :utf-8 "’" :html "’" :latex "'" :texinfo "'")
  (apostrophe :utf-8 "’" :html "’")

However, consider the following example:

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  #+OPTIONS: ':t
  #+language:es

  "my friends' party and the students' papers"
  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

the above produces in LaTeX:

  \guillemotleft{}my friends'' party and the students'' papers\guillemotright{}

In Spanish, as in other similar cases, the issue is easier to reproduce
because:

  (secondary-closing :utf-8 "”" :html "”" :latex "''" :texinfo "''")
  (apostrophe :utf-8 "’" :html "’")

I don't know whether to consider this a bug or a limitation in the
current implementation, originating from how Org interprets an
apostrophe. Although I suspect it has a difficult solution: how to
differentiate an apostrophe from a second-level quote in certain
scenarios, when the approach seems to be essentially heuristic? Let us
also consider cases in which the apostrophe can be placed at the
beginning of a word, as in Greek:

  "να 'ρθώ το βράδυ"

(Org would confuse the apostrophe in the word 'ρθώ with second-level
opening quotes)

Perhaps a possible solution would be to allow the use of a specific,
customizable character, other than an apostrophe, for second-level
quotes. Or at least add some brief warning in the manual: in certain
contexts it is safer to use a explicit Unicode character for the
apostrophe.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel

--
Juan Manuel Macías -- Composición tipográfica, tratamiento de datos, diseño 
editorial y ortotipografía