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fletcher / peg-multimarkdown

An implementation of MultiMarkdown in C, using a PEG grammar - a fork of jgm's peg-markdown. No longer under active development - see MMD 5.
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French opening single quote an apos not a quote? #137

Closed elmimmo closed 11 years ago

elmimmo commented 11 years ago

Hi,

https://github.com/fletcher/peg-multimarkdown/blob/master/utility_functions.c#L361 (commit a9a6e1f38a) assigns an Apostrophe (Unicode name) as an opening single quote for texts in French, instead of a Left Single Quotation Mark (Unicode name), while the closing single quote is indeed assigned to a Right Single Quotation Mark (Unicode name).

Do you have a reference for Apostrophe being the correct character for opening single quotation mark in French?

It looks weird and unbalanced to me. Yet, I am not French native, and could not find anything in Wikipedia explaining what the proper character is (Non-English usage of quotation marks. French, or in any other source (in English or Spanish) that I tried. I did found HTML authoring in French (the correctness of which I cannot tell) which explicitly calls against it:

The typographically correct apostrophe (’) is the same as in English. In character code standards, it is regarded as identical with the right single quotation mark, which explains the notation ’. The notation ' denotes the Ascii apostrophe (') and should never be used in text.

fletcher commented 11 years ago

The "foreign" language support for MMD was based on the international versions of Gruber's SmartyPants.pl program.

Multiple French and French-Canadian users of MMD have not reported to me that things are incorrect. The absence of complaints is not the same as confirmation of being correct, but it's all I have at the moment.

Many things about other languages looks "weird and unbalanced" to me, so I will need something a bit more convincing for me to change the code (since it has basically been in use for 4+(?) years without me being mobbed by the French). But certainly I am open to corrections if necessary.

elmimmo commented 11 years ago

As I am not native French I have nothing else to bring this issue forward. Thank you for the explanation.