Preventing not-so-smart quotes (was Re: To .jpg or not)
Preventing not-so-smart quotes (was Re: To .jpg or not)
- Subject: Preventing not-so-smart quotes (was Re: To .jpg or not)
- From: Walter Ian Kaye <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 17:58:05 -0800
At 03:55p -0800 03/25/2004, Christopher Nebel didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:
On Mar 22, 2004, at 5:10 AM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
There is NO Rule six!
Only two weapons: fear and surprise. ...and a ruthless efficiency.
Our THREE weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and
an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Our FOUR... no... AMONGST
our weapons... amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear,
surprise... I'll come in again.
Look, they just told me to come in here and say "The crossbeam's gone
out of skew on treadle." I didn't expect a kind of Spanish
Inquisition.
What I *really* gag at is the use of grave accent ` as a fake left
quote, resulting in a geometrically-unbalanced "\***|" envelope in
most fonts. Anytime I download an RFC or man page with those
monstrosities, I do a bunch of search/replace operations to fix
them. It should be outlawed!
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but in most cases it's
automatically generated by [tng]roff, which knows about real curly
quotes and is merely trying to approximate them in ASCII.
Well sure, but that's like trying to approximate the Mac UE using Win32s. ;)
I prefer a computer/platform/charset to be honest about itself.
If you feel really strongly about it, you could modify the one on
your system to not do that, which would at least make local man
pages palatable.
Incantation?
And some Cocoa programs try to "correct" straight quotes into curly
quotes ... It shows up when using ProFont 9 ...
It turns out that this isn't Cocoa (exactly), it's simply that Cocoa
is obeying glyph substitution features turned on in ProFont,
Yup, though I don't know how anyone is supposed to know that. I would
*never* have guessed that a font would have such a thing, and indeed
I'm told that fonts *should not* do that. Who knew? Not me. But now I
know!
while older programs ignore them. (It's not a Cocoa-specific thing;
you can see the same behavior in any ATSUI-based application, such
as WorldText. The fact that ProFont has this sort of thing on by
default is ironic considering its stated purpose.)
Indeed. I wonder how the tables got in there in the first place?
(ProFont: <
http://members.aol.com/squeegee/>)
These days the standard Font palette has a Typography palette which
can turn the substitution on and off, or you can munge the font to
get rid of the features entirely. (Walter already knows this, as
it's in his bug, but I thought other people might care.)
Procedure:
1) Download the new CLI-based font tools from Apple
<
http://developer.apple.com/fonts/OSXTools.html>
2) Install the package.
3) Work on a copy of ProFont that is not installed/active.
Use the "ProFont" suitcase file.
(If you copy from Fonts folder, be sure to either use Finder
or CpMac in Terminal, as it's a resource-fork file.)
4) Remove the 'feat' and 'mort' tables as follows:
%> ftxdumperfuser -t feat -k ProFont
%> ftxdumperfuser -t mort -k ProFont
5) [Re]Install ProFont
-boo
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