GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 532777
Patch to use pretty quotes for various strings in file manager
Last modified: 2008-07-04 21:20:14 UTC
Just did a quick sweep over fm-directory-view to replace various uses of "%s" with “%s”.
Created attachment 110770 [details] [review] Patch
Thanks for your efforts. I like those quotes, but we need a GNOME-wide policy before switching to them. I am not sure which variant is considered correct in English. Reading through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark suggests that the proposed variant is used in literature.
Definitely “ and ” (66's, 99's). They are classically unused in computing and typography because of the limited keys on a typewriter, and the fact that they’re not in any ASCII codepage. Here in the 21st century, we have Unicode, and non-English locales frequently make use of, for example « and » for quotation marks. It’s time for English to look as beautiful as the rest of the languages we translate to!
Are we going to do this then?
As you know, I proposed the policy change on the desktop-devel-list, but it triggered a controversial discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-May/msg00033.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-June/msg00048.html The main concern by Alan Cox and others was that using "unescaped" UTF-8 characters inside source code (i.e. not "\x...", but UTF-8 encoding) is not allowed in C source code, and it is not supported by foreign compilers. While gcc supports it, it is a very tough argument, because we do not just target recent gcc compilers. That said, I am not sure whether it is worth the effort. It was also proposed to explicitly translate the affected strings to en_* with "" -> “” conversions. I'm not a big fan of this - but this might be the onliest viable solution.
There was an overwhelming rejection of Alan's concerns in favour of better typography and KISS principles. I will sooner eat my own face than waste my time catering for non-existant use cases.
I am sorry, but the compiler issue may actually be a real-world problem, even though the other concerns were mostly theoretical. I think you somewhat overreacted by just closing this bug report.
No need to be sorry, let's just move on. I just wanted the patch and bug off my list. Fair enough, we're not going to do this kind of stuff on a wider scale until we have a proper policy in place. In such event, this report is then pointless, as there are still many other places even within Nautilus where quotes could be converted.