On 11 Feb 2000, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[...]
>Yes, that's a pain. The quote inset should be redesigned completely to
>choose automatically the right quotes depending on language, and to
>support both normal and 'inner' quotes (which will or will not be
>single quotes).
>
>However, I do not know enough on the various national quotes mechanism
>to design a general scheme with confidence.
Well, if that's all you need to know, I'm sure all Lyx users will
gladly provide you with some information concerning their mother
tongue. But I doubt that automagical quotes would work out in
practice, since (at least in German, but I think that applies to
English as well) the type of quote chosen implies a certain meaning.
For example, I'd use single quotes to point out something like
... this so-called 'whatever' ...
or to mark an expression which refers to a specific author, but is not
a quote in the strict sense of the word, e.g.
... Bataille's notion of a 'general economy' implies that ...
One might use italics in the latter case, but that tends to be
confusing since italics are used as emphasis and in this case the
point is not to emphasize but to mark an expression as terminus
technicus.
An auto-quote feature would insert double quotes in both cases if the
expression were not already nested in double quotes. The complicate
matters even further, there are two types of quotes in German, the
common ones and the guillemets flipped horizontally. The latter are
usually used in books while the former can be found in things like
newspapers and business letters.
--
Philip Lehman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
