4 ms·

I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and i

I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever it is called. Someone complains your program gives them an error when they open a csv file you sent them. You tested your program, it works. You go on the phone with them for 30 minutes, try to figure out what the fuck was going on. There it is, it was opened in a program that meddles with that "" and replaces it with the “” shit. Also, there has to be at least one time you're fucked by the "" -> “” snobbiness when you go to a random Wordpress site and paste the command they tell you to do to the command line and realize it doesn't work. You pull your hair for a couple of minutes, and there is that sneaky ” thing. Wordpress does that for anything it doesn't think as code (inb4 ”good programmers don't paste commands from wordpress to GNU+bash“). One of the first things that I do when I set up a new Mac computer is to turn that damn "" -> “” ““““feature”””” off.

hunter2_ 9y ago
> at-the-beginning-of-the-file That thing's the BOM.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Which you don't really need with UTF-8, it only has a purpose for UTF-16+.
  - adiabatty 9y ago
    It's useful to tell a text editor "This is UTF-8, not Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 or whatever you might be used to".
    - mjevans 9y ago
      No, just do 8-bit clean, don't SCREW with the encoding if you weren't asked to.
      - gnud 9y ago
        An editor can't "just do 8-bit clean", it has to display the characters. The same bytes will sometimes be displayed differently in utf-8 and (e.g.) ISO-8859-1. I'm not sure if a BOM is a good way to handle it, but saying 'just do 8-bit clean' doesn't work when you're displaying or printing the characters for humans to understand.
hunter2_ 9y ago
You forgot to mention leading apostrophes getting autocorrected to left_single_quote instead of right_single_quote, as in John Doe ‘42 An abomination ‘cause it's a damn apostrophe, not opening a quotation.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
For anyone wondering, this is how to turn that feature off. System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text -> Use smart quotes and dashes (uncheck).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
LeoNatan25 9y ago
Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.
- jimmies 9y ago
  I never said I hate the 69 quotation thing. I said I hate the automatic conversion of the straight quote to the 69 quote behind my back. Imagine they automatically replace the "fi" with the styled "fi" behind your back and breaks text searches and normal text files. You can be snobby all you want, as long as you initialed it and know you don't break programs' assumptions. No one says you can't have nice shit with LaTEX and Pagemaker when you need it. Here people who just open the file and save it, or copy the text and paste it, don't mean it, yet it happens without them ever knowing.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    Regarding ﬁ, it just shows how broken most search engines are. As a reader, what is the difference between between ﬁ and fi? Or between a and а? If the search engine is distinguishing those because of Unicode characters, it has failed completely.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Unicode turns trivial string comparison problems into pretty much AI-complete ones. Same visual characters, different meaning. Different characters, but same visual meaning for the person who initiated the query. Up/down-case not well defined, and even if it is, it's not always reversible (i.e. tolower(toupper(tolower(string))) is not equal to tolower(string)). There's lots of that. The longer I live, the bigger fan of simplification and standardization I become. Like with dates and times. Timezones and DST are a fucking nightmare, because politics. And then doubly so, because people enjoy themselves with their favourite regional writing formats. At this point I'm all for enforcing ISO 8601 on every communication involving dates and times. Some people object that this is turning humans into machines, etc. So be it. Nature isn't perfect, and clear communications doesn't come to us naturally. Yet it is absolutely vital in a technological society.
athenot 9y ago
On a US-English keyboard on the mac, you can always type the proper glyphs directly on the keyboard. That's always been harder on windows where one would have to type some numerical character code each time they wanted some non-ascii character. That's where the auto-replace originated. On the mac: Option [ “ (English open quote) Option Shift [ ” (English close quote) A lesser-known feature is that some other quotations are also possible from that same US-English keyboard: Option \ « (French open quote) Option Shift \ » (French close quote) Option Shift W „ (German open quote)

hunter2_ 9y ago

> at-the-beginning-of-the-file That thing's the BOM.

jiggunjer 9y ago
Which you don't really need with UTF-8, it only has a purpose for UTF-16+.
- adiabatty 9y ago
  It's useful to tell a text editor "This is UTF-8, not Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 or whatever you might be used to".
  - mjevans 9y ago
    No, just do 8-bit clean, don't SCREW with the encoding if you weren't asked to.
    - gnud 9y ago
      An editor can't "just do 8-bit clean", it has to display the characters. The same bytes will sometimes be displayed differently in utf-8 and (e.g.) ISO-8859-1. I'm not sure if a BOM is a good way to handle it, but saying 'just do 8-bit clean' doesn't work when you're displaying or printing the characters for humans to understand.

hunter2_ 9y ago

You forgot to mention leading apostrophes getting autocorrected to left_single_quote instead of right_single_quote, as in John Doe ‘42 An abomination ‘cause it's a damn apostrophe, not opening a quotation.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

For anyone wondering, this is how to turn that feature off. System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text -> Use smart quotes and dashes (uncheck).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

LeoNatan25 9y ago

Must not be a fan of typography then. Sadly, the tech world is full of the likes of you, so even if people care, in many cases—such as dashes—they are not even aware of the alternatives. Gladly Apple has decided not to follow your ““““opinion”””” by default.

jimmies 9y ago
I never said I hate the 69 quotation thing. I said I hate the automatic conversion of the straight quote to the 69 quote behind my back. Imagine they automatically replace the "fi" with the styled "fi" behind your back and breaks text searches and normal text files. You can be snobby all you want, as long as you initialed it and know you don't break programs' assumptions. No one says you can't have nice shit with LaTEX and Pagemaker when you need it. Here people who just open the file and save it, or copy the text and paste it, don't mean it, yet it happens without them ever knowing.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  Regarding ﬁ, it just shows how broken most search engines are. As a reader, what is the difference between between ﬁ and fi? Or between a and а? If the search engine is distinguishing those because of Unicode characters, it has failed completely.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Unicode turns trivial string comparison problems into pretty much AI-complete ones. Same visual characters, different meaning. Different characters, but same visual meaning for the person who initiated the query. Up/down-case not well defined, and even if it is, it's not always reversible (i.e. tolower(toupper(tolower(string))) is not equal to tolower(string)). There's lots of that. The longer I live, the bigger fan of simplification and standardization I become. Like with dates and times. Timezones and DST are a fucking nightmare, because politics. And then doubly so, because people enjoy themselves with their favourite regional writing formats. At this point I'm all for enforcing ISO 8601 on every communication involving dates and times. Some people object that this is turning humans into machines, etc. So be it. Nature isn't perfect, and clear communications doesn't come to us naturally. Yet it is absolutely vital in a technological society.

athenot 9y ago

On a US-English keyboard on the mac, you can always type the proper glyphs directly on the keyboard. That's always been harder on windows where one would have to type some numerical character code each time they wanted some non-ascii character. That's where the auto-replace originated. On the mac: Option [ “ (English open quote) Option Shift [ ” (English close quote) A lesser-known feature is that some other quotations are also possible from that same US-English keyboard: Option \ « (French open quote) Option Shift \ » (French close quote) Option Shift W „ (German open quote)