[XeTeX] Typographic question : quotation marks and apostrophes

[Andrew Brown]

My target was really off in another direction, William -- we have digitized the characters that compose our words, but not the words themselves, so we remain unable to understand their meaning without examining the context, and perhaps not even then. A trivial example : every morning, a French service indexing auction sales offers me the chance to bid on one or more armchairs, known here as Voltaires, when all I want are books by or representations of the man.

On the quotes front, one answer, generally inapplicable, is to move away from Anglo-Saxonia and to use « and », and double quotes within quotations. Most programs handle that automatically now.

A.

On 21 déc. 2011, at 18:36, William Adams wrote:

> On Dec 15, 2011, at 2:40 PM, Andrew Brown wrote:
> 
>> Indeed, but we continue to think that we have digitized our texts when all we have done is to digitize a few character forms. We are footling around in the dark ages.
> 
> _That_ is why TEI has a specific markup for quotes --- there are some enlightened projects.