[Techtalk] ? and "

[Akkana]

> Carla Schroder wrote:
> > All right, what kind patient person out there can explain how " gets changed 
> > to ?

hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk writes:
> I think I know what this is. It's to do with something called "smart
> quotes", which is something used in some MS programs. This turns

Mac OS9 programs tend to do this, too.

> Someone has written a program called demoroniser which removes these,

Mozilla does the right thing (looks in the current font for each
character, and if there's no glyph corresponding to the character,
it goes looking for a font about the same size that does have one,
or, if it can't find one, just maps it to a suitable ascii equivalent.

But I usually read mail in mutt in an rxvt window.  I got annoyed by
this once, and made a patch for mutt to get it to map smart-quote
characters to their ascii equivalents (which was very easy -- the
mutt source turns out to be very clean and easy to modify).  I
offered it back to the developers on the mutt list, but they didn't
want it because (insert some hand-waving that I didn't follow about
why it theoretically shouldn't be needed although no one actually
seemed to know how to set things up so that they were displayed
correctly).

I never did figure out why they didn't want the patch.  I thought
maybe if I compiled rxvt with the right options, then it would map
the smartquote characters, or would do what mozilla does and look for
a font with the appropriate glyph.  Maybe this one?
  --enable-languages      enable multichar glyph language support
Nope, I just tried recompiling rxvt with that option and it
still doesn't display smart-quotes correctly.

And if I could find a font that I could use in rxvt that just had
those characters in the first place, all would be solved.  But there
don't seem to be any decent fixed-width fonts that have the extended
characters (even the truetype font set from Windows doesn't have any). 

Anyone know of a linux font editor that lets you take an existing
font and add a few glyphs to it?

	...Akkana