[XeTeX] tex-text and more quotes

Will Robertson wspr81 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 3 03:21:56 CEST 2007


On 8/3/07, Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think others have already indirectly answered your question. The << ligature
> is not really a typographic ligature but a way to access a glyph of a font.

I do understand this argument but I fall on the side of the << crowd.
tex-text is just for backwards compatibility, and T1 fonts contain
these ligatures. The question is: do your (or anyones') documents
contain << ,, or >> in text (not math) that would be rendered
incorrectly by the proposed change in tex-text? You can argue about
the inelegance of the system, but truthfully it's ugly to use `` '' --
and so on in the first place.

(As a concrete example, if you use the real em-dash instead it's
possible to make it active and insert spaces around it, as well as
transform into an ascii hyhen in PDF bookmarks and so on.)

Finally, how come everyone isn't just using csquotes (if they're using
LaTeX) for their quoting needs? I find it both powerful and
convenient, but I admit it's not for everyone.

Will


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