[XeTeX] Whoever said quotation-marks are unimportant?

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi Bruno,

The situation with the quotes is even more complicated. For French, I assume that the Academie Francaise has an official style guide. And writing this email, I went to the Dutch wikipedia, which I should have done long before. The result: there are no 'rules' in the Dutch language ;-)) . The "low double quote" ( ,,Hallo", he said) is 'traditional', but inverted high quotes are equally valid. Single quotes are allowed, but generally discouraged for citations, instead they are used for emphasis or irony:

,, I wonder if you 'question' is really a question.", said the teacher.
I have a 'modern' computer (an Atari 2600 or so).

Guillemets are part of the official Dutch typography but are seldom used (I remember my grandparents had old books with <<this is a quote>>).

In English, the inverted upper quotes are traditional for opening a citations, and the normal double quotes to close it, single quotes are used to 'cite within a citation'. 

In Dutch, a continuation of a citation gets new quotes:

"This is piece of text which was written as a quotation."
"In the new paragraph, the speaker just continued to talk like there was no tomorrow."

In English, a continued quotation is usually not closed, but new opening quotes are used:

"This is piece of text which was written as a quotation.
"In the new paragraph, the speaker just continued to talk like there was no tomorrow."

Anyway. Dutch is thus easy. There are no rules and thus one cannot make mistakes :-)).

Wilfred


--- On Sun, 7/27/08, Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at me.com> wrote:

> From: Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at me.com>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Whoever said quotation-marks are unimportant?
> To: wvanrooijen at yahoo.com, "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
> Date: Sunday, July 27, 2008, 1:29 PM
> Le 27 juil. 08 à 19:10, Wilfred van Rooijen a écrit :
> 
> > When using latex, I can make 'upturned double
> quotes' by typing ``.  
> > Latex reads this as a 'special sequence' and
> puts the upturned  
> > double quotes. If I do the same in xetex, I don't
> get the upturned  
> > double quotes. How can I get the upturned double
> quotes in xetex, I  
> > don't see it on my keyboard.
> 
> When calling a font with fontspec use [Mapping=tex-text],
> or for all  
> fonts use \defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}.
> 
> > As a related matter, in English (if I'm not
> mistaken), a quote is  
> > opened with the 'upturned double quote' and
> closed by the normal  
> > double quotes.
> 
> In English (not my mother language) I could never find out
> if there's  
> a difference between double and single quotes and if so
> what each type  
> of quotes means. I thought maybe one type was used when
> quoting  
> somebody and the other type for meaning so-to-say or
> so-called, but I  
> could never find a logical pattern.
> 
> In French we always use guillemets « », though now with
> more and more  
> people writing on computers you tend to see quotes "
> " more and more  
> often.
> 
> Bruno Voisin