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Comment by kristjansson | Hacker News Reader

Typographic quotes are left- and right-handed, vs. the ASCII double quote which is just a single character:

   “quoted”

   "quoted"

Who in the blazing highs of techno-utopianism fervor thought it was a good idea to automatically translate the latter to the former we'll never know.

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Why not stylize it as typographic but store it as a "regular" double quote though?

How do you handle non-paired ones then?

Render them as standard double quotes? The same way Markdown renders a single backtick as just a backtick, but text surrounded by backticks becomes code.

Nice try, but the problem with this is that typography is _really_ complex. For example, there is a rule in English typography (I'm not sure if it's often used today though) that when you have a quotation spanning several paragraphs, you should put an _opening_ quote at the beginning of each paragraph – but only one _closing_ one at the end of the quote.

We've let go of other historical typographic and spelling conventions, it's time to let go of that one too.

It would be quite sad. Besides, it is not an arbitrary convention, it serves a purpose.

No it doesn't. Unbalanced quotation marks are a crime against humanity.

Computers exist to represent, transmit, and display _human_ communications. If a computer system cannot represent a human utterance we should extend the representational capacity of the computer system, not force the human to conform to the limitations of the technology.

I'm also all for eliminating overly complicated typographical conventions from places where they are technologically possible.

Computers also generally don't support scribbles in the margins of your document. Or stylized glyph variants except a few that have been grandfathered in, e.g. ꙮ. Neither does the computer support whatever ligatures you might make up on the spot.

One thing that makes computers more powerful than analog tools is that they are much much much more structured.

So while we should not take computer limits for granted I think that the opposite extreme is just as if not even more absurd.

I would base direction on adjacent whitespace/punctuation instead of trying to do pairing.

Nice try, too. How would you handle Spanish quotation marks at the beginning of the sentence, then? And what about French quotes which are separated from their contents by a thin space? All of that is possible, of course, with large tables of special cases.

Or, you know, you could just have separate characters for opening/closing quotation marks. ;-)

> All of that is possible, of course, with large tables of special cases.

Yes, that's how ligatures work. Pairing across characters is the one I'm not sure I've heard of before in fonts.

Edit: Besides, how do you think these are typed on keyboards without separate keys? The software already detects and replaces them based on context.

One problem with that is that the correct start/end quotes to use depend on language which is not always know for all text snippets.

I'm french and I actually really like the auto-translation. This way software that does not care about which quote those are (mail, web, etc) can swap them, and where it matters then it does not translates it (vim, etc).

Sadly the new official french azerty keyboard has dedicated keys for both opening and closing quotes, and the good ol' simple quote tucked away behind modifier keys. As a dev I hate it. (arguably I should not even use azerty for development but that's another issue)

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