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Wrong Typographical Quotes


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I have checked Publisher's Typography settings to replace straight quotes with typographical quotes, but am getting wrong results in German. "Straight" quotes are replaced with “cursive” upper quotes, but German typography demands the leading quote to be a lower quote.

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Der Austausch “gerader Anführungszeichen” durch typographische Anführungszeichen funktioniert nicht richtig: Das führende Anführungszeichen müsste unten stehen wie in diesem „Beispiel”.

 

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  • 1 month later...

But is is not a clever setting, limiting the type of quotes to the boring German ones, Pauls!

In books we prefer »quotes like this«, similar to the ones used in France or Switzerland, but exactly the other way round and without spaces!

So, you should review your quote management in Publisher! It is incomplete and partly wrong. See my image.

My two cents: Do it as you have done in PagePlus, allow the users so choose their individual type of quotes. Some other DTP apps grant you the same choice, for instance InDesign and QuarkXPress. There is only one ignorant word processor that does not care about German preferences at all: Word. Other word processing apps do! :)

WrongQuotes.png

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47 minutes ago, Interior Book Design said:

So, you should review your quote management in Publisher! It is incomplete and partly wrong. See my image.

Are you perhaps interpreting "left guillemet" in the Text > Insert > Quotation Marks menu as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the left (starting) end of the text" and "right guillemet" as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the right (ending) end of the text"?

What it seems to actually mean is "guillemet that points left" and "guillemet that points right". The semantics of how they are to be used (beginning of quote, end of quote) seem to be up to the user. If for your language usage you want a right-pointing guillemet at the beginning (left) of the text, then choose "Right Guillemet", since that is the one that points right, which is the one you want. As the user you always know which you want to insert, when you are inserting them manually via that menu.

(Note that this is not what the topic was about. It was about the auto-correct setting for "change straight quotes to typographic quotes", but that could have a simiar problem as it is based purely on the declared language of the text, and you would need to have dictionaries installed for German, Swiss German, French, Swiss French, etc. so that you could declare text to be using those languages, before the auto-correct functionality could begin to know what kind of guillemets to use.)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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Are you perhaps interpreting "left guillemet" in the Text > Insert > Quotation Marks menu as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the left (starting) end of the text" and "right guillemet" as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the right (ending) end of the text"?

Yes, this seems to be quite obvious.It's exactly the way I interpret the commands for double and single left/right quote. The left opening one is named first, the closing one after it.

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What it seems to actually mean is "guillemet that points left" and "guillemet that points right".

Maybe, but I would never think of it. So, I guess, it is pretty misleading.

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(Note that this is not what the topic was about. It was about the auto-correct setting for "change straight quotes to typographic quotes" ...

Well, this exactly what I criticize: the auto-correct setting should not give us a poor choice but allow us to choose the best kind of quotes. I'm a typesetter, in 9 out of 10 cases we choose »this kind of quotes«.

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3 minutes ago, Interior Book Design said:

Well, this exactly what I criticize: the auto-correct setting should not give us a poor choice but allow us to choose the best kind of quotes. I'm a typesetter, in 9 out of 10 cases we choose »this kind of quotes«.

If you're criticizing the auto-correct setting, then I was confused, because you seem to be talking about the Text > Insert menu, which is not part of auto-correct. Sorry for my confusion.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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11 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Are you perhaps interpreting "left guillemet" in the Text > Insert > Quotation Marks menu as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the left (starting) end of the text" and "right guillemet" as meaning "the guillemet that goes on the right (ending) end of the text"?

"left guillemet", etc. are translation errors, it should be the real name for those. For example in French we've got « and »: "opening guillement" (guillemet ouvrant) and "closing guillemet" (guillemet fermant), and if we use “, ” or ‘ and ’ we'll talk about english opening/closing guillemets or simple opening/closing guillemets (we don't use those ones).

ID call them "chevrons" («»), but I never heard anyone using this term, and can't remember how QXP named them. But since everyone know where is the beginning and the ending of a citation, using "opening" and "closing" would be better that "left" and "right".

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On 1/8/2020 at 9:11 AM, Wosven said:

But since everyone know where is the beginning and the ending of a citation, using "opening" and "closing" would be better that "left" and "right".

Definitely, but in Germany/Austria the opening one looks like this: » and this one « ist the closing guillement. In Switzerland they use it like in France, but with no spaces. Makes translation more complicated.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Unicode standard says:

Quote

00AB  «  LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
= left guillemet
= chevrons (in typography)

 usually opening, sometimes closing

Since the left-pointing guillemets/chevrons are “usually” opening, I can live with them called “left” even in German.

But I’d also like to be able to define my own sets of quotation marks.

BTW “guillemots” are sea birds, not quotation marks, even if Adobe used that word in their “standard”.
 

Another related issue: In InDesign I could replace " by " and get typographical quotation marks according to the current settings. I used that feature very often to normalize the articles in my projects.

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On 1/8/2020 at 2:11 AM, Wosven said:

ID call them "chevrons" («»), but I never heard anyone using this term

I don't think I heard anyone use it either, but yesterday I did run across the term in a French grammar resource that was discussing guillemets in French: 

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 Dans un texte en français, on doit utiliser les guillemets français, en forme de chevrons doubles (« »), qu’il s’agisse de guillemeter des mots français ou des mots d’autres langues.

Normally "chevron" in French refers to the single < and >.

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24 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

I don't think I heard anyone use it either, but yesterday I did run across the term in a French grammar resource that was discussing guillemets in French: 

Normally "chevron" in French refers to the single < and >.

Hah. I often use DeepL's Windows add-on to translate text on the web. I ran it on your French quote...and I feel it was being too helpful:

Capture_000426.png.8576fd2bc03e083e81c3b849e15aba0b.png

I would have preferred it have kept the guillemots.

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On 1/8/2020 at 9:11 AM, Wosven said:

"left guillemet", etc. are translation errors, it should be the real name for those. For example in French we've got « and »: "opening guillement" (guillemet ouvrant) and "closing guillemet" (guillemet fermant)

That would hardly be more clear or correct. Consider that the APub menu command language is 1 only – but possibly a few different text languages within one document. So '"opening.. " and "closing..." in the menu would need to switch their result according to a currently selected text frame. To avoid that problem the quotes placed via menu simply ignore the selected text language. So,  @walt.farrell found a proper way to think of left and right for << and >> as their pointing direction.

Note the wide variety in this "Summary Table", listing quote marks in their language which are hopping around with 'opening' and 'closing':  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Quotation_mark   E.g. especially Finnish might make your idea of menu naming complicated because it makes no difference between opening and closing.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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Since "Guillemet" came from the man who create them, I'll keep chevrons for describing patterns, in cloth design or decoration.

It's interesting to note that when printers didn't have guillemets characters, it was custome to use inverted coma(s), explaining the (early) use of what we call now "curly quotes".
Another idea was to use a different font (a script), but it cost too much for small printers.

It's what we can read in my Google translation of:

The Practical Science of Printing
Containing very easy instructions to improve in this art
There you will find a description of all the parts of which a press is built, with the means to remedy any faults that may arise.

IMG_01.thumb.jpg.e46909e742ee632062cf19d0c969cdd2.jpg

IMG_02.thumb.jpg.8059da3a5348552e925764fffe1be162.jpg

IMG_03.thumb.jpg.4b8dd331e50013c0ddd367321b5bf010.jpg

 

 

On 1/31/2020 at 4:07 PM, thomaso said:

That would hardly be more clear or correct.

There's 2 ways to describe quotes: their visual form/design (as it's done now), or using their position and hierarchical value (single/double).

Visual form, like in HTML entities or character description (left/right | single/double | quote) is only usefull if you know and understand what you're doing, but a lot of beginners will use the wrong quotes and apostrophe (not curly ones, i.e. in French the straight keyboard english quotes) instead of the right ones because they don't know better.

Another option is to use the terms for position and (why not) the term "typographic", keeping "single" and "double" for a hierarchical help. This way, people with no knowledge would be able to insert the right character at the right position in a sentence, without knowledge (but they would learn easily this way), depending the language set in the paragraph/character style.
It seems more universal for me than a design descriptor of a character, or a very long menu with each possibilities depending of each language possibilities.
This way, the menu options would only offer possibilities depending of the paragraph/character language setting depending of the cursor position.

And if we need to insert different quotes but the ones for this language, they would be inserted using the Glyphes panel or other keyboard shortcuts.

 

It's the way I would like an application to help me, instead of needing to search Wikipedia to learn more (and since the Wikipedia page about French quotes is wrong, citing chevrons nobody use in French, I found difficult to trust them about this…).

 

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11 hours ago, Wosven said:

Another option is to use the terms for position and (why not) the term "typographic", keeping "single" and "double" for a hierarchical help. This way, people with no knowledge would be able to insert the right character at the right position in a sentence,

That is what I meant to say: exactly this would not work for all application languages, because also the typographical quote marks are related to the text language, e.g. the '>> ' can/should be used either at the beginning or at the end of a quote even within 1 language (German): it depends on the local region. (as mentioned above in other's posts) Or see Finnish, where one of >> and << never gets used but you need to choose the begin or end quote mark twice instead.

In this way Affinity can't avoid for the user the need to either know or to recherche the correct use him/herself; the app hardly knows whether someone is typing e.g. French but on a English OS, or German but in Switzerland.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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In French, we can use too the closing double quote at the beginning of each line of a citation, but we don't need different names for it or different entries for the same character. Why not having the correct translation depending of language for naming the different quotes instead?

And checking the translation from other apps and dictionaries can give a cue, no need to be creative when there are already existing technical terms (the French translation  need a lot of editing).

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