[sword-devel] OSIS Quote Marks

[Chris Little]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Victor Porton wrote:

> On 28-Jun-2003 Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> > Hey guys,
> >       Added a new option for the .conf files and check for it in OSISRTF. 
> > You might need to update your OSIS filters to handle it as well,
> > 
> > OSISqToTick=false
> > 
> > This should turn off the translation of <q> to " or '  (Chris, maybe you 
> > could put in the correct unicode values for 
> > [open|close][Single|Double]Quote)
> 
> Better would be have more detailed settings like the following!
>
> LeftQuoteSymbol = <<
> RightQuaoteSymbol = >>
> 
> It is because one may want to use even other quote marks (e.g. "<<" and
> ">>" may be good for plain text),

This is part of the crux of my arguemtnt that use of OSIS <q> in lieu of
actual quote marks is a bad practice.  Characters, including quotation
marks, are data and should be represented as character data, not markup,
IMO.

We can support translation of <q> into some kind of quote mark if we want
to, but I can assure you that I, personally, will never create a module
that does not represent quotation marks as quotation marks.  Assuming that
<q> represents them requires a different style-sheet for every single
locale-dependent quotation style.  It's not even as simple as
language-dependence; en_US and en_GB have different quotation styles.  And 
it's an issue of module locale, not user locale, so it would have to be 
handled on a module by module basis.

I say dump handling of <q> entirely except for <q who="Jesus">.

> For Unicode chars we would use e.g. backslash notation (like \x12F4).

We use UTF-8.  Always.

--Chris