Christian Perrier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The sources I found (and IIRC the discussion we had) mention that > British English uses LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2018), and RIGHT > SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019). American English is said to use the same > but double quotation marks (U+201C, and U+201D) are used for first level > quotations.
Yes, correct. This is a UK vs. US difference. In the US, one writes: "The quotation should be 'last to go,'" he said. In the UK, as I understand it, one writes: 'The quotation should be "last to go,"' he said. There's no strong reason to prefer one over the other; it's just a matter of convention which unfortunately differs depending on the side of the pond. (There are some weak reasons, such as " not being ambiguous with an ASCII apostrophe.) > As we have "agreed" to follow American English conventions, that maybe > means we should use double quotation marks. I'd still recommend to use > the simple ones (") and not U+201C and U+201D as this would lead with > problems with debconf templates i18n (gettext complains when non ASCII > is used in msgid as it wrongly assumes that English does not use > anything but plain ASCII). Agreed. It's probably too soon to go to Unicode quotes. And not all fonts have great support for them: the code point is usually there, but often the quotes look "weird" next to the rest of the text. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]