Hi,
I don't know if this is a known issue, but I haven't been able to find
any mention of it. I think this is partly because in English it can go
perfectly unnoticed, since for English the values of secondary-closing
and apostrophe are identical:
(secondary-closing :utf-8 "’" :html "’" :latex "'" :texinfo "'")
(apostrophe :utf-8 "’" :html "’")
However, consider the following example:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
#+OPTIONS: ':t
#+language:es
"my friends' party and the students' papers"
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
the above produces in LaTeX:
\guillemotleft{}my friends'' party and the students'' papers\guillemotright{}
In Spanish, as in other similar cases, the issue is easier to reproduce
because:
(secondary-closing :utf-8 "”" :html "”" :latex "''" :texinfo "''")
(apostrophe :utf-8 "’" :html "’")
I don't know whether to consider this a bug or a limitation in the
current implementation, originating from how Org interprets an
apostrophe. Although I suspect it has a difficult solution: how to
differentiate an apostrophe from a second-level quote in certain
scenarios, when the approach seems to be essentially heuristic? Let us
also consider cases in which the apostrophe can be placed at the
beginning of a word, as in Greek:
"να 'ρθώ το βράδυ"
(Org would confuse the apostrophe in the word 'ρθώ with second-level
opening quotes)
Perhaps a possible solution would be to allow the use of a specific,
customizable character, other than an apostrophe, for second-level
quotes. Or at least add some brief warning in the manual: in certain
contexts it is safer to use a explicit Unicode character for the
apostrophe.
Best regards,
Juan Manuel
--
Juan Manuel Macías -- Composición tipográfica, tratamiento de datos, diseño
editorial y ortotipografía
