[XeTeX] Whoever said quotation-marks are unimportant?

[Will Robertson]

Starting to ramble now...

On 28/07/2008, at 2:01 PM, Andrew Moschou wrote:
>
> But I would write:
> 'HAL said, "Good morning, Dave.".', recalled Frank.

I can't agree more with endorsing this "ad hoc" style that is much  
more logically consistent than moving the punctuation inside the  
quotation. Although perhaps a little over-enthusiastic with the stops :)

As an argument against that many full stops, I'd point to the fact  
that there wasn't even such a thing as the full stop in the early days  
of written Latin (and other languages?), where they wrote in caps and  
knew when sentences ended by the placement of the verb.

Obviously, that wouldn't work for English :) but I like to think of  
full stops as indicators of the end of sentences when it's otherwise  
not clear. In your case above "Good morning, Dave." is clearly a  
single unit so the full stop, while not incorrect logically, is a  
little redundant.

The other reason is that we don't want to fill up the page with lots  
of little marks. It's a bit busy, typographically. Which is the  
primary reason I like to use single quote marks as much as possible;  
"`good morning'" is less intrusive than "``good morning''". The one  
exception is in ascii, where I can't get out of the habit of using  
double quotes.

Any scheme anyone chooses to use should be consistent first, pleasing  
to them second, and "correct to the standards" third. In my opinion :)

Will
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