Re: [Docutils-develop] punctuation redux

[Adrien B. <adr...@fr...>]

Le mercredi 29 D=C3=A9cembre 2004 19:26, Alan G Isaac a =C3=A9crit=C2=A0:
>=20
> 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.

You forgot 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.

iv.    They use a good input method and/or a good editor.

With a Shift and an AltGr key, keys can produce four different
characters. With 48 (or 49) normal keys on most keyboards, that's
192 or 196 characters, out of the 192 characters Latin-1 contains.
Also, since Latin-1 contains a lot of accented characters, a few
well-defined dead keys can be used to produce a lot of characters.
I'm not even talking about a compose key.

All this is available on X Window, and used by many keyboard
mappings that ship with it. As far as I know, there's no mapping
that includes support for all 192 characters in Latin-1, but I
don't think it would be too hard to create.

Then, if a good keyboard support is not enough, a good editor
can save the day. Good editors allow you to input arbitrary
characters (using their number in the current encoding). Of
course this is cumbersome, but since good editors also allow
you to define arbitrary key mappings, this is a moot point.

> Obviously, I am hoping for (iii).

Work could also be done on (iv), in the tools/editors directory,
or maybe a new tools/keyboards...

--=20
adr...@fr...