Another take on the English apostrophe in Unicode

[Philippe Verdy]

2015-06-15 15:20 GMT+02:00 QSJN 4 UKR <qsjn4ukr at gmail.com>:

> By the way, about smart quotes. I am using that for long time. My
> keyboard layout generates two characters on one key-press (so I have
> to enter [«»][←]{sth}[→] instead of [«]{sth}[»]). It's not that good,
>

You could generate three keystrokes [«][»][←] from a single keypress to get
the same effect.

Various editors already do that when you press the first key for the
opening quote, and all you have to type then is the [→] key (instead of the
key for a closing quote) after typing the word.

Such system is used in many IDE or text editors for programmers when they
enter the opening parenthese, or square bracket, or single/double quotes,
or braces, or block comment prefixes, or any paired symbols or keywords
used in the programming language (e.g. "begin | end" in Pascal, "#if
|\n#endif" in C/C++ preprocessor directives : the pipe here notes the
position of the cursor after typing what is just before it, what is after
the pipe is inserted after the cursor position).

If you disagree with those automatic insertions after the cursor, you can
immediately press CTRL+Z to cancel this added suffix but keep what you just
entered. another CTRL+Z will undo your previous keypress(es) for the
character(s) just before the cursor position. Some editors are even smarter
before the cursor position is not just a single position but a selected
range and as long as you continue typing just before this range, the
selection is preserved, and when you press [→] it will skip over this whole
selection and you an also press then the backspace key to delete that
autoinserted selected range. If you move your cursor elsewhere, the
selection is unselected and you get back to the normal insertion cursor
with an empty selection.

Such system is used for example in Notepad++ (for Windows), or Eclipse (you
can disable this automatic insertion in your preferences).

This editor feature does not depend on the character layout but depends on
the selected language for matching pairs: it does not have to be limited to
programming languages and can be used as well for natural human languages,
including in advanced word processors. It can also be used to insert
automatically some additional space when you just press an initial quote:
entering only [«] when editing French text, what you would get is
[«][NNBSP]|[NNBSP][»] (with the cursor selection over the last two
characters). These editors normally have a way to edit their automatic
insertion rules (with the text to match before, the text to add jut after
it, the new cursor position, and the text to insert just after it (and to
hopefully preselect in such a way that when continuing entering text
without moving the insertion position, it is not overwritten but just
preseves this selected text). Such rules can be part of the parameters for
the spell checker.
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