Re: [Docutils-develop] attribute of SmartQuotes transform

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2017-05-31, jfbu wrote:

...

> the point is only that 0.13.1 was using attr='2' in
> transforms.universal.SmartQuotes() but 0.14rc1 uses attr = 'qDe' and
> thus the isolated '' is converted not into a closing double quote but
> in a pair of opening+closing quotes.

The change to skip "backtick quote conversion" was motivated by considering:

* reStructuredText uses Character 0x60 ('`' GRAVE ACCENT) as inline
  markup character, therefore the ``backtick quotes'' convention (common in
  TeX) does not make sense in rST documents. (You would need to escape the
  backticks like \`\`here''.)
  
* Switching off "backtick quote" conversion reduces the risk of 
  conversion errors and speeds up processing.

> This is relevant to Sphinx to the extent that since
> 1.6.1 it hands over to Docutils the smart quotes processing
> and did not have direct control of the attr=default setting
> in transforms.universal.SmartQuotes()

The changed output should not bother, as both, previous and current
conversion is most likely unwanted.

Important is to suppress smartquote-conversion for all literal text:

a) Sphinx developers must consider/handle the additional "literal nodes"
   in Sphinx.

b) End users must remember to escape or mark as literal any quotes that
   should not be "educated", if setting "smart-quotes" to True.


Because of b) (and the possible mis-conversions), I suggest making the
smart quotes feature an opt-in also in Sphinx.

Günter