[Ads-l] testing intelligent quotes

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

These messages are somewhat technical and may be boring to mailing
list participants. However, I think discussing this topic may help
improve the readability of messages.

My previous message was composed using distinct open quotes and close
quotes. However, based on Robin's analysis, before I sent the message
I changed a setting option in gmail. The setting now reads:

Avoid Unicode (UTF-8) encoding for outgoing messages

Apparently, this caused the gmail web interface to remove the
"intelligent" quotation marks and replace them with "dumb" quotation
marks before sending the message. This may sidestep the
encoding/mishandling problem (in part). Hence, I will continue with
this setting for now.

Garson

On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 4:45 AM, ADSGarson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: testing intelligent quotes
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thanks for your analysis, Robin. The quotation marks in my messages
> are sometimes obtained via cutting and pasting text from websites.
> Here is an example of an "open quote and a close quote" from a
> website.
>
> Apparently I will have to hunt for these quotation marks, remove them,
> and replace them with "simple" quotes until there is some kind of
> resolution to this problem.
>
> Garson
>
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 5:31 PM, Robin Hamilton
> <robin.hamilton3 at virginmedia.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: testing intelligent quotes
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Benjamin Barrett wrote (or didn't write):
>>
>> START SELECTION
>>
>> I am unable to see the smart quotes and have never gotten Chinese, =
>> Japanese or Korean correctly from the ADS list. Nevertheless, I=E2=80=99m =
>> not completely convinced that it=E2=80=99s an application issue.
>>
>> END SELECTION
>>
>>              Succinctly, UTF-8 in, ASCII out.
>>
>> Right apostrophe in UTF-8 is represented by   e2 80 99
>>
>> Thus, contracted I am becomes ...  I=E2=80=99m =  as above.
>>
>> The = sign seems to be signalling that the following characters are in
>> UTF-8, but they don't get translated.
>>
>> = also seems to occur when there's a word-wrap symbol in the original text.
>> What comes out of the sausage machine is a line break AND the = character.
>>
>> MORAL:  If using Notepad, avoid any characters beyond those represented by
>> the first 128 characters of Unicode, where there's a one-to-one mapping of
>> UTF-8 and ASCII, *and* switch-off the word-wrap function before copying into
>> an email.
>>
>> Health warning:  I worked that out via mousing around on google, so I may be
>> completely wrong.
>>
>> Robin
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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