Wednesday 14 August 2002

Can I quote you?

Dorothea Salo wrote:

The typographic and archival quality of First Monday is similarly low; nary a typographic quote (such as I employ in CavLec; I note with interest that several bloggers have recently learned how to do this also, possibly from me) to be seen.

Mark Pilgrim wrote:

I am now using Brad Choate’s amazing MT-Regex plugin to automatically turn my straight apostrophes curly.

I knew how to do typographic apostrophes and quotes—after all, I use em-dashes frequently—but a combination of laziness and somehow getting it into my head that I didn’t like the look of curly quotes on a computer screen stopped me using them. Now there’s no excuse, assuming it’s possible to use MT-Regex to do both quotes and apostrophes.

It’s not clear from either the MT Change Log or the Documentation, when the plugin architecture was introduced. Was it with version 2.2? If so, this will have to wait until I move to the new server.

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Comments

Plug-ins require MT 2.2.1. Apostrophes are easy because there are a limited number of patterns. Quotes are harder to pick out of a crowd. Best to use the Q tag and some CSS (or even an MT-regex to turn the Q tags into the corresponding HTML entities, which I'm experimenting with).

Posted by: Mark Pilgrim on 14 August 2002 at 09:49 AM

Don't look at me. I've got &#82 programmed into F1 on my Kinesis...

I've dealt with double-quote issues before. I'll go dig up some old conversion regexes and see what I can do toward something that works most of the time.

Posted by: Dorothea Salo on 14 August 2002 at 09:53 AM

I've had trouble with curly quotes rendering properly in browsers configured natively for french, german, and italian. Don't know why...

Posted by: Phil Wolff on 14 August 2002 at 01:08 PM

Phil, were you using Unicode entities for the curly quotes?

Posted by: Jonathon Delacour on 14 August 2002 at 04:54 PM

Bet he was using <q>. We'll see if I'm right.

Posted by: Dorothea Salo on 14 August 2002 at 11:04 PM

This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed.

© Copyright 2002-2003 Jonathon Delacour