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

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Ihor Radchenko writes:

> Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:
>
>>   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>>   #+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{}
>> ...
>> 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.
>
> I think that we can address examples like this simply by not replacing
> unbalanced quotes. There is already some effort in the code towards such
> treatment, but it is not complete.
>
> Can you try the attached patch?

Hi, Ihor,

The patch works fine, and I think it can prevent a lot of cases. But
false positives can still appear. Consider (second level quotes open
after the colon):

"two articles: 'my friends' party' and 'the students' papers'"

"A Greek folk song says: 'να 'ρθώ το βράδυ'"

==>

\guillemotleft{}two articles: ``my friends'' party' and ``the students'' 
papers'\guillemotright{}

\guillemotleft{}A Greek folk song says: 'να ``ρθώ το βράδυ''\guillemotright{}

I think the only solution here would be to introduce a Unicode
apostrophe (’). Or allow an optional, alternative character for
second-level quotes:

"... `my friends' party` ..."