I loath smart quotes.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Bob_Robertson Aug 30, 2010 4:02 PM EDT |
'Nuff said. |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 30, 2010 5:23 PM EDT |
Yes-and-no. I like "proper" quotation marks as opposed the inch suffix that surrounds the word earlier in this sentence. But applications shouldn't be smart about them and start replacing things I didn't type. |
| Steven_Rosenber Aug 30, 2010 5:32 PM EDT |
All true geeks hate smart quotes. I've gotten over it, especially now that most of what I write is for the Web and the expectation of Web readers is that there will not be smart quotes. I used to have a print editor who would basically take the .doc and plow it onto the page. Whatever formatting you had, that's what you ended up with, and in a magazine format, the type just doesn't look good without smart quotes. So at the time, coming up with well-formatted text was very important. And in Abiword, just like in OpenOffice, you can choose to turn smart quotes on or off. I can't recall the default in OO, but in Abiword and KWord (which finally fixed its smart-quotes issues) the default is off. |
| gus3 Aug 30, 2010 5:38 PM EDT |
Smart quotes don't copy-paste well between document formats (including to/from HTML's [q] tag). That is my only complaint. |
| Scott_Ruecker Aug 30, 2010 5:57 PM EDT |
Bingo gus3! I get terse and peevish when that happens..lol! |
| gus3 Aug 30, 2010 6:38 PM EDT |
But isn't "terse" a good quality in an editor? Kind of like concision? |
| Scott_Ruecker Aug 30, 2010 6:42 PM EDT |
It is good when applied to the task of Editing but not when in reference to the mood of said Editor..;-) |
| Bob_Robertson Aug 30, 2010 7:00 PM EDT |
> I can't recall the default in OO On. > But isn't "terse" a good quality in an editor? Why does my mind instantly jump to vi vs. emacs? > Kind of like concision? Too close to "incision". |
| gus3 Aug 30, 2010 7:22 PM EDT |
Quoting:Too close to "incision".Not in the sense of, cutting out stuff that shouldn't be there. |
| gewb Aug 30, 2010 8:57 PM EDT |
I was given the task of converting/exporting 1,500 MS Word docs into HTML for Web publishing - I learned to HATE "smart quotes" as well as the em dash and a few other "MS specific" characters that don't play well with HTML. |
| Steven_Rosenber Aug 30, 2010 9:19 PM EDT |
I have trouble all the time with nonstandard em dashes. I don't get as much trouble with smart quotes, but I do a lot of text processing to get HTML-compliant em dashes into my copy. |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 31, 2010 12:54 AM EDT |
It's just a simple search and replace away. I use proper opening/closing quotes, apostrophes and em and en dashes when I write blog articles (the ' sign on your keyboard is not an apostrophe but the sign for feet, like " is the sign for inches). Proper typography just makes text look much nicer IMHO. Especially in this day and age where you get nice fonts and typesetting on the web. |
| gus3 Aug 31, 2010 1:08 AM EDT |
Quoting:Proper typography just makes text look much nicer IMHO. Especially in this day and age where you get nice fonts and typesetting on the web.The problem is getting different document formats to understand one another. Where OpenOffice.org sees smart quotes, copying them and then pasting them into an HTML document gets you some character entities, rather than a Q and /Q tag pair. |
| jezuch Aug 31, 2010 2:34 AM EDT |
Well, I don't know. If you're using utf-8 and you still have problems with "smart quotes", then something else is wrong. We here in Central Europe, renegades of the ASCII *and* latin1 worlds, learned early on to care deeply about character sets. But now you just set utf-8 everywhere and you're mostly done. |
| tuxchick Aug 31, 2010 10:28 AM EDT |
I love modern technology. After we get smart quotes sorted out, maybe we can progress to fixing hyphens. And after computers are almost as good as typewriters, the next natural steps are interplanetary travel and curing disease and hunger. |
| jdixon Aug 31, 2010 10:40 AM EDT |
> And after computers are almost as good as typewriters, the next natural steps are interplanetary travel and curing disease and hunger. The problems with curing hunger are primarily political and secondarily logistical, TC. We can produce more than enough food for everyone. Getting it to the people that need it is the problem. |
| Bob_Robertson Aug 31, 2010 11:20 AM EDT |
> and secondarily logistical I've always wondered why those big ships don't go nuclear. Take a submarine-sized reactor, put it into a decent sized container/cargo ship, and not worry about fueling it for _years_. oops, back to stupid quotes. "" |
| Sander_Marechal Aug 31, 2010 7:23 PM EDT |
Environmental concerns, most likely. What we need is fusion, not fission. Ten times the power, no messy fuel source and hardly any waste. |
| jdixon Aug 31, 2010 8:32 PM EDT |
> What we need is fusion, not fission. Ten times the power, no messy fuel source and hardly any waste. We already have a fusion reactor, at a nice safe distance of ~93 million miles. We should probably look into better ways of using it. Which is not to stay we should stop research and trying to develop fusion reactors. Merely that they're still a long way off. Instapundit had an interesting link about thorium reactors earlier today: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-cou... |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 01, 2010 1:26 AM EDT |
Interesting article jdixon. On paper that could very well fill the gap until fusion is fully developed. By the way, did you notice that *yet again* there is a market here where a dominant, incumbent player is actively working to stop progress and maintain the status quo? |
| jacog Sep 01, 2010 3:18 AM EDT |
It always bothers me when I read headlines that go like this: "Open source app now has mundane feature that its peers have had forever." or "How to do something in Linux that should really require no howto for any user." |
| gus3 Sep 01, 2010 3:38 AM EDT |
Quoting:"How to do something in Ubuntu that should really require no howto for any user."FTFY. |
| jdixon Sep 01, 2010 9:23 AM EDT |
> By the way, did you notice that *yet again* there is a market here where a dominant, incumbent player is actively working to stop progress and maintain the status quo? Yes. But TOS concerns dictate that discussing the reasons for that wouldn't be appropriate here. |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 01, 2010 9:30 AM EDT |
> What we need is fusion, not fission. Indeed, but that's like saying "what we need is antimatter". Very easy to say, not so easy in practice. Have you seen the video "Should Google Go Nuclear"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU Fission works fine, there are many designs such as the small sea-going reactors and pebble bed, which can be applied where appropriate. Chernobyl shows what happens when a good design for a small reactor gets scaled up to HUGE without understanding why the design works only when _small_. Waste is not a problem. The small quantities of highly unstable "waste" is prized for science and medicine, reprocessing reduces low-level waste to a minimum, and it can easily and safely be left to "waste away", as it were, dropped into an ocean trench or an isolated valley in Nevada where no one will even notice it. |
| jdixon Sep 01, 2010 9:44 AM EDT |
> ...and it can easily and safely be left to "waste away" To be fair, Bob, we have little idea what's actually safe over the time frames we're talking about. As a species, we're simply not used to operating on that scale. So, safe for the short term, yes. For the long term we simply don't know. |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 01, 2010 11:41 AM EDT |
> For the long term we simply don't know. I couldn't agree more! One reason I don't want to really get rid of it, just throw it into the sun is one way, is that there is no way to know what uses people might invent in the future. Could be a process that makes use of the low-level activity to generate power, or more efficient reprocessing. Yes, I focus on the positives rather than the negatives. For negatives, there's aways Nevada. :^) Edit: Let me add something for perspective. During the atmospheric test years, the fallout levels were many times (orders of magnitude) greater than what was officially reported. When people had reactions, it became assumed that the low reported levels of fallout were the cause. So while avoiding radiation is always a good idea, there is an ingrained emotional over-reaction to the actual dangers of low-level radiation. |
| hkwint Sep 01, 2010 8:04 PM EDT |
Quoting:there is no way to know what uses people might invent in the future. Rest assured: Terrorists are trying to solve that problem right now! |
| gus3 Sep 03, 2010 1:29 AM EDT |
Right now, I count two headlines in the RSS feed (via linuxhomepage.com) which have fouled entity conversions: "Used PC’s is the path to Linux desktop adoption." "Open Source Software is “coming of age�: Accenture" |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 03, 2010 11:28 AM EDT |
JD is right, Thorium! http://apcmag.com/could-thorium-help-nuclear-power-clean-up-... "From an environmental perspective, the good news about thorium is that it’s far less radioactively damaging than uranium: its naturally occurring form, monazite, is said to be reasonably safe for human exposure, while the waste products from its use in a nuclear reactor decay remain dangerous for only a fraction as long – decades instead of thousands of years, by some accounts." Invention is a mother! |
| jdixon Sep 03, 2010 1:16 PM EDT |
> Thorium! Didn't I just say that a few posts above? Checks... Yep. Right there, though a different article. |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 03, 2010 1:21 PM EDT |
Then I guess I'll just have to fix it so it's more clear. |
| hkwint Sep 03, 2010 2:17 PM EDT |
Protactinium sounds so much safer... |
| caitlyn Sep 03, 2010 2:45 PM EDT |
Quoting:Protactinium sounds so much safer... Sounds too much like procrastinatium... Quoting:The problems with curing hunger are primarily political and secondarily logistical, TC. We can produce more than enough food for everyone. Getting it to the people that need it is the problem. Amen. Sadly that is something that people across the political spectrum agree on and yet nobody has a solution, or at least one that is implementable. Quoting:After we get smart quotes sorted out, maybe we can progress to fixing hyphens. And after computers are almost as good as typewriters... My very first job (part time in high school and on breaks from college) had me working in a typing pool banging out export documentation, all of which has many, many copies. I actually spent a summer in Boston all expenses paid because the entire staff of that office had walked out and I was the fastest typist in the pool. I could churn out the documents. Anyway... the point to this is that computers are better than typewriters and have been for a long time. Make a typo on a multi-part carbonized document that can't have typos because it's going to some part of the world where the customs officials won't accept typos and you got to start over. For less fussy places and airline documents we had white out and green out and blue out and yellow out so we could correct typos in the proper color for each copy of the document. If I mistype something on a computer I backspace and retype. Computers are SO VERY MUCH EASIER! |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 03, 2010 3:49 PM EDT |
Using UTF-8 to display the characters on the screen in the word processing app would make copy/paste into HTML documents more pleasant, do you think? Even though I wrote the Abiword document, I prefer to use text editors, but unfortunately I'm being called upon to generate all manner of reports, and that means .doc, .xls and .ppt all the live-long day. |
| jdixon Sep 03, 2010 4:06 PM EDT |
> Then I guess I'll just have to fix it so it's more clear. That wasn't really necessary, Bob. I was just disappointed that you hadn't read the original link. |
| Bob_Robertson Sep 03, 2010 4:18 PM EDT |
> Sounds too much like procrastinatium... An element that can't be bothered to be radioactive. > I was just disappointed that you hadn't read the original link. Didn't see it. I disappoint myself sometimes, too. |
| hkwint Sep 03, 2010 7:04 PM EDT |
Caitlyn: At least with the old fashioned type machines, you think before you type! |
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