Re: Whose problem is a strange French typesetting habit...

On Sat, 2013-10-26 at 16:11 +0200, Bert Bos wrote:

> Another example of differing typographical traditions is how to use
> quotation marks: We have a <q> element in HTML, and that seems to make
> sense as long as you deal with English, Dutch or German. Just make the
> style sheet insert the appropriate quote marks at the start and end
> and you're done. But in French, the recommendation is to start a quote
> with an em-dash at the start of the line, nothing at the end of the
> quote, and nothing where the quote is interrupted either:
> 
> English:
> 
>    ... to the street. <q>Hello,</q> he said, <q>I'm John.</q> 
> 
>    ... to the street. “Hello,” he said, “I'm John.”
> 
> French:
> 
>     ... dans la rue. <q>Hallo,</q> il disait, <q>je suis John.</q>
> 
>     ... dans la rue.
>     --- Hallo, il disait, je suis John.

The em dash style is also frequently used in novels set in English. It
requires a slightly different writing style, and so should not normally
be considered a matter only of presentation: the author needs to be
aware of potential ambiguities when the end of the quote isn't marked,
as in your example.

British English uses single quotes rather than double, and in that style
putting punctuation inside quotes has a somewhat different (and lesser)
effect on typographical colour of the page:

    Nic chimed in mournfully, ‘Don’t you remember? Susan said “Never
    eat them!” but we all forgot.’

> The 'quotes' property of CSS simply cannot handle that. To the point
> that I now think that the <q> element in HTML was a mistake: either
> it's too much (authors could add the punctuation by themselves) or too
> little (lacking mark-up for the “he said” in the middle).
Agreed.

> B.t.w., older traditions in various countries are even worse, from the
> point of view of CSS. If a quotation was longer than one line, the
> quote mark often used to be repeated at the start of the line:
> 
>     He started to explain: “When I
>     “ entered the church, there was
>     “ already somebody there. I don't
>     “ know who.” Then he stopped.

Although that's no longer done, you do sometimes see in English-language
magazines a bar to the left of the text in speech. It's very rare
though.  More importantly for the doom of “q” is the treatment of a
quotation that goes from the middle of one paragraph to the middle of
the next. You cannot write,

   <p> . . . . <q>The dark sock . . . .</p> <p> . .devoured.</q>. . .
</p>

There have been a number of techniques invented in XML to handle this,
because it occurs moderately often. Although they are all reasonably
easy to deal with using XSLT and XPath, they are not necessarily easy to
process with CSS I think.

Also not: in a multi-paragraph quoted text in English there is an open
quotation mark at the start of each paragraph until the end is reached,
so, in the “dark sock … devoured” example I just gave, the first
paragraph would not have a closing quote and the second paragraph would
have an opening quote and a closing quote half-way through, after
“devoured.”.

> This style is not used in any modern books, as far as I know (maybe
> precisely because the computer has trouble with it :-) ), which is an
> argument for not bothering with it in CSS. On the other hand, maybe
> people want to mimic old books...
It was abandoned with the increased acceptance of the closing double
quote mark, long before the computer took its grim mechanistic hold over
our lives.

>  how do we make it sure that the various requirements we may formulate
> are in line with different cultures and writing systems? Or at least
> they reasonably cover a major percentage of the globe's population?

By involving and asking experts from multiple cultures. I'm particularly
concerned about getting involvement from India and from places where
Arabic scripts are used, where people may not be used to interacting
with foreign groups or may even feel resentful.

But let's start by getting this second document fleshed out, and then
maybe we could have a wiki or a document describing language-specific
and culture-specific differences in specific areas.

There are also variations within subject domains, for example with
handling of references, footnotes, marginalia and end-notes.

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Saturday, 26 October 2013 19:44:05 UTC