Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1

On 22.02.2025 13:15, Richard Damon wrote:

 
[...] It did like so many other programs a "pretty" transformation of
a simple single quotation mark, to a fancy version.

Good to put the "pretty" in quotes; I've seen so many "fancy versions",
one worse than the other. They are culture specific and on a terminal
they often look bad even in their native target form. For example “--”
in a man page (say, 'man awk') has a left and right slant respectively
and they are linear, but my newsreader shows them both in the same
direction but the one thicker at the bottom the other at the top. It's
similar with single quotes; here we often see accents used at one side
and a regular single quote at the other side. In 'man man' for example
we find even a comment on that in the description of option '--ascii'.
There's *tons* of such quoting characters for the various languages,
in my mother tongue there's even _more than one_ type used in printed
media. Single or double and left or right and bottom or top or mixed
or double or single angle brackets in opening and closing form, plus
the *misused* accent characters (which look worst, IMO, especially if
combined inconsistently with other forms).

I'm glad that in programming there's a bias on symmetric use of the
neutral forms " and ' (for strings and characters and other quoting)
and that things like accents ` and ´ *seem* to gradually vanish for
quoting purposes; e.g. shell `...` long superseded by $(...). Only
document contents occasionally still adhere to trashy use.

One thing I'd really like to understand is why folks have been mixing
accents with quotes, as in ``standard'' (also taken from 'man awk').

They may look acceptable in one display or printing device but become
a typographical catastrophe when viewed on another device type.

</rant>

Janis
--

0022;QUOTATION MARK
00AB;LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
00BB;RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
2018;LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
2019;RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
201A;SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
201B;SINGLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
201C;LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
201D;RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
201E;DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
201F;DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
2039;SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
203A;SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
275B;HEAVY SINGLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
275C;HEAVY SINGLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
275D;HEAVY DOUBLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
275E;HEAVY DOUBLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
275F;HEAVY LOW SINGLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
2760;HEAVY LOW DOUBLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
276E;HEAVY LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
276F;HEAVY RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
2E42;DOUBLE LOW-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
301D;REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
301E;DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
301F;LOW DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
FF02;FULLWIDTH QUOTATION MARK
1F676;SANS-SERIF HEAVY DOUBLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
1F677;SANS-SERIF HEAVY DOUBLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
1F678;SANS-SERIF HEAVY LOW DOUBLE COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
E0022;TAG QUOTATION MARK

0027;APOSTROPHE
02BC;MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE
02EE;MODIFIER LETTER DOUBLE APOSTROPHE
055A;ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE
FF07;FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE
E0027;TAG APOSTROPHE