[Docutils-develop] punctuation redux

[Alan G I. <ai...@am...>]

David helped me understand that there will be no
no character entity reference system in reST.

As a result, users who prefer to stick to ASCII or even
Latin-1 will find they have no direct access to important
punctuation characters.  For such documents that need to
produce good punctuation, I see three easy solutions, the
first being a bad one.

i.      Every such document defines substitutions
        for its own punctuation.
ii.     Every such document uses an include for a
        punctuation file, along the lines of
        http://docutils.sourceforge.net/tmp/charents/README.html
        (Related request: please allow file inclusion by
        specification of a URL.)
iii.    reST could *include* a small default set of basic punctuation
        substitutions, which would be over-ridden by any
        redefinition in the document.

Obviously, I am hoping for (iii).

Cheers,
Alan Isaac

PS Sample implementation (tested).

.. |--|  unicode:: U+02013 .. EN DASH
   :trim:
.. |---| unicode:: U+02014 .. EM DASH
   :trim:
.. |`|   unicode:: U+02018 .. LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
   :rtrim:
.. |'|   unicode:: U+02019 .. RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
   :ltrim:
.. |``|  unicode:: U+0201C .. LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
   :rtrim:
.. |''|  unicode:: U+0201D .. RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
   :ltrim:
.. |...| unicode:: U+02026 .. HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS
.. |<|   unicode:: U+02039 .. SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
   :rtrim:
.. |>|   unicode:: U+0203A .. SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
   :ltrim: