[OS X TeX] howto do smart (double) quotes with texshop

[Patrick Gundlach]

Ross Moore <ross at ics.mq.edu.au> writes:

Hello Ross,

> > i do not have texshop installed, but why don't you use the mac-roman
> > double quotes (get with alt-^ and alt-2 on a german keyboard) and use
> > \usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}? 
> 
> This is not a solution that I would recommend, for anything but
> short documents that are unlikely ever to be needed again
> (e.g. one-off letters and short notes).

I do not completely agree...

> The problem is that your source code will become unreadable when
> viewed on non-Mac platforms; 

Right.

> and now that Macs have become Unix-boxes, then you will have
> difficulties also with some Unix editors.

But when all the editors I use, support the encoding, there shouldn't
be any problems.


> Exchanging files with co-authors, using PCs or Linux, will become
> a nightmare. 

Well, once you have to exchange your .tex files, there is indeed need
for a different encoding. But a small perl-script will then suffice.
 
> Extracting portions of your own documents for reuse will mean that
> you will always have to check the font-encodings.
> 
> In future, the MacRoman encoding may disappear altogether, or you may
> (god forbid) switch to a different platform, or MacRoman may even
> become unsupported by Apple, as Unicode becomes more wide-spread.
> 
> In these events, your own documents will become difficult for you
> to reuse yourself.

Ok, that is really a problem.

But i think that the tex-source code will be much more readable. And,
it is easier for beginners to use the Alt-^ for the lower left double
quote and not remember which single quote they have to use... is  it '
or ` or ´. I for myself always use latin1, so I cannot enter all the
nice chars directly.


> Is it really so hard to get into the habit of typing:
> 
>    ``beginning of phrase
>    ^^---------------------- backquote character
>      end of phrase''
>                   ^^------- normal quote character 

well, in german(.sty) you would type "` and "'. That is not the big
problem (except for the single quote). But we have a lot of characters
like äüß etc. that have to by typed in as "a or "b. This makes
TeX-text awful.


> and avoid using " unless you really need it; e.g. for accents
> and other ligatures in European languages.

They are not rare...

> This will keep your documents fully compatible with other TeX users,
> for all (?) time.

Probably...


Patrick

-- 
I'll fade into the darkness

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