[impression-x] smartquotes -- old bug reappears

From: Jim Nagel <jim-imp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: impression-x@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 12:37:53 GMT

Smartquotes -- a new glitch has appeared.  Type this:

   "We also offer DIY heart-transplant kits," he said.

The quotemarks should be respectively 66 and 99 (characters 148 and 
149). However, they both appear as 148.

Same problem with singlequotes (characters 144 and 145).

This is when they occur following a comma.

But following a fullstop, the correct closequote appears.  Haven't 
tested all other preceding-character psssibilities.

Publisher+ 5.13 did not have this glitch; it's new in Impression-X.

Hey!!  In my file of Impression notes, I find an email I wrote to 
William Waghorn at CC in 1996 (!!) reporting this very same bug in the 
then-new version 5.08, as well as a bug about having the kerning 
(Ctrl-T) dialogue open.  Copy of email attached.  So maybe a source 
file that Richard is using for Impression-X predates the fixing of 
this smartquote bug, and possibly of the other one as well.

The old email also contains a suggestion about the algorithm that 
Impression uses internally to decide which is opening and which is 
closing quote.  I suggested a better and perhaps simpler algorithm 
that we used a long time earlier when I was involved in making CC's 
Wordwise drive a Linotype machine.


-- 
Jim Nagel                        www.archivemag.co.uk

960214 1625   CC   impression bugs & suggs

William --

While I=91m writing, a few little items I=91ve noticed in Impression 5.08:

1.  Typing with Smartquotes on, Closequote after a comma 
is the wrong way round:  =94Fix it,=94 he said. (I dunno what rule 
you is built in, but when we had Wordwise driving a Linotype in 
1982, our rule was fairly foolproof:
   Openquote appears only after  certain characters such as space, return,
tab, openbracket, dash  or another openquote, or if it=91s the very first
character in the file;
   otherwise it=91s closequote.
   The only case where this falls down is  rare words such as '92 or
'phone beginning with an apostrophe, but other algorithms fail here too,
and you just type these  manually.)

2.  You can crash Impression by having the Kern dialog 
(Ctrl-T) open while doing a search-and-replace. This happened 
repeatedly when I was searching for Closesinglequote 
Closedoublequote (Alt-145-149) intending to slightly extend the 
space between them.

3.  Suggestion:  the Change Case dialog should, like the 
Replace dialog, provide keyboard shortcuts instead of having 
first to click a radio button and then OK.

4.  Do you have a copy of David Pilling=91s Imagemaster there? I 
commend its Save As dialog -- Impression=91s has become less 
convenient, requiring a submenu, since you added the (welcome) 
options to save as RTF etc.


-- 
 -- jim nagel
 (Computer Shopper mag)

[impression-x] smartquotes -- old bug reappears

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