6 ms·

Entirely unrelated, but this headline made me notice that Chrome finally supports entering " in the find-in-page box and having it match so-called smart quotes.

shurcooL 13y ago
I recall it doing that (for other symbols too) for quite a while. At least 4-6+ months, on stable channel.
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Yup, it's definitely done that for a while. It does become a pain when you actually want to locate quotes that need smartening up, though.
- GauntletWizard 13y ago
  Why? Why would you do that to the world? Smart quotes are about the dumbest concept that has ever existed.
  - omaranto 13y ago
    What's so dumb about them? Do you like your opening and closing parenthesis to be the same, too?
    - raldi 13y ago
      No, which is why they have separate keys on my keyboard, unlike smartquotes, so I can always easily specify exactly which I want. Also nobody magically switches my parentheses around out from under me.
      - oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
        There are many wonderful characters that don't have their own individual keys on your keyboard. Heck, there are a lot of characters that require at least one meta key to be pressed in combination with another key, and single quote marks are accessible in exactly that way on my keyboard too (Mac, YMMV). And, yes, autocorrect can be a PITA, especially when it's not actually getting things correct, but that's a different, albeit related, issue. We should really refer to quote marks, or apostrophe (which are often rendered as curly, and are the characters that autocorrect switches to), and the prime symbol (which is the unadulterated character that you get with the non-meta-pressed key on your keyboard), rather than using the term 'smart quotes'.
        kps 13y ago
        Not to detract from the substance of your post, but the unshifted keyboard key pretty much universally generates an ASCII apostrophe (U+0027, '), not a prime (U+2032, ′, as used for feet and minutes, and while I'm babbling, the addition of a second prime for seconds is not a coincidence). ~~~~ wavy lines starting flashback ~~~~ ASCII 1967, in conjunction with its European counterpart ECMA-6, permitted the visual appearance of some characters, including the apostrophe, to be modified so that they could be used as accents when overstruck¹: ' " , ^ ` ~ ˊ ¨ ¸ ˆ ˋ ˉ (using the modern Unicode spacing modifiers) Later versions of ECMA-6 suggested that the accent interpretation be used only when the character was actually overstruck: In the 7-bit character set, some printing symbol may be designed to permit their use for the composition of ac- cented letters when necessary for general interchange of information. A sequence of three characters, comprising a letter, BACKSPACE and one of these symbols, is needed for this composition; the symbol is then regarded as a dia- critical sign. It should be noted that these symbols take on their diacritical significance only when they precede or follow the character BACKSPACE; for example, the symbol corresponding to the code combination 2/7 normally has the significance of APOSTROPHE, but becomes the diacritical sign ACUTE ACCENT when preceded or followed by the character BACKSPACE.² Although this was fine for the printing teletypes in use when ASCII was first designed, early video terminals were too dumb to handle overstrikes, so it never caught on. ¹Revised American Standard Code for Information Interchange, from http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html ²ECMA-6: 7-Bit coded Character Set, 4th Edition, August 1973, from http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-6,%204th%20Edition,%20August%201973.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ~~~~ wavy lines ending flashback ~~~~
        raldi 13y ago
        Please don't abuse tildes in this way; use the proper Unicode wavy-line character: ⌇
        cnvogel 13y ago
        But your wavy line has the wrong orientation... 2307 ⌇ WAVY LINE http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf What you most likely intended to present as an alternative is the... 301C 〜 WAVE DASH http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf unicode smiley ➩ ☺
      - deathanatos 13y ago
        They don't have a dedicated key, I suppose, (but then again, you have to hit <shift> to get parens…) but smart quotes are <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{ on OS X, and configured to be <compose>, <, " and <compose>, >, " on my Linux machine. Smart quote are a bit of a pain, but they do look nice. Really I prefer em dash, en dash, ellipses; I regret that OS doesn't have a keyboard entry for bullet. (Then, Linux doesn't either, other than entering in the code point directly with Ctrl+Shift+U or whatever it is.)
        roryokane 13y ago
        On OS X, you can type a bullet • with <option>+8. You can also edit your keyboard layout to make certain characters possible or easier to type, using Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...) for OS X. I created a custom layout using Ukelele that makes typing smart quotes easier. With it, opening ‘ and closing ’ single smart quotes are <option>+[ and <option>+] instead of <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{, and double smart quotes “ ” are similarly more intuitive to type. I use it all the time. You can try it out yourself by downloading it from http://a.pomf.se/bipwcr.zip http://a.pomf.se/bipwcr.zip and moving the two files into “~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/”.
        mattdw 13y ago
        option-8 on my mac keyboard is •.
  - oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
    ‘Smart quotes’ are actually more typographically ‘correct’; that key on your keyboard is a prime symbol which is NOT the same as an apostrophe or a single quote mark. Apart from reducing ambiguity, they also look a lot nicer (in decent fonts), particularly at larger font sizes. I cringe when I see a prime (or ‘straight quote’) symbol being misused on TV or in print.
    - talmand 13y ago
      Just curious, how do you feel if a font, let's say it is a decent font, is designed to make the apostrophe look like a prime symbol?
  - ygra 13y ago
    German Wikipedia uses proper quotes instead of the straight variety. I did a lot of wikignoming a while ago and fixing quotes (and non-breaking spaces, and citation formats) was among the things I did. Being able to quickly find straight quotes on the page is very helpful in that regard.
w1ntermute 13y ago
Meanwhile, Firefox continues to distinguish between e and é when searching, despite Chrome having fixed this bug years ago.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  Does it depend on the locale, perhaps?
- reubenmorais 13y ago
  > this bug "9001 Wrong Things Programmers Assume About Internationalization" This behavior should at a minimum be locale-aware. I would be surprised if Firefox did that by default in my pt-BR profile.
  - chavesn 13y ago
    (I'm not programming this kind of thing so please forgive my ignorance.) Is that loose of a search not actually desirable in "find in page" instances? In other words, are there many words where 'e' matching 'é' would actually generate a false positive? This is the only case I could see that would be problematic. And even then "find in page" is usually used as quick navigation to the minimum matching search (high recall) and not about excluding all possible mismatches (high precision).
    - logicchains 13y ago
      There are words in other languages, French for instance, that with an accent changed or removed have completely different meaning.
      - bausson 13y ago
        That is sadly true. It's even worse than that. 'e' is the most used letter in french, but 'é' and 'è' are quite used too. 'ê' and 'ë' being rarer, but still existing. So, I am exaggerating it a bit, but you can compare it to having to search for words with the consonants, because every vowel is considered the same by your search algorithm. Yes, I'm pushing it, but you see the problem it can easily become in huge pages.
wbsun 13y ago
Ah, this is off topic and let me close it to show off my power... hmm, are we on SO?

shurcooL 13y ago

I recall it doing that (for other symbols too) for quite a while. At least 4-6+ months, on stable channel.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago

Yup, it's definitely done that for a while. It does become a pain when you actually want to locate quotes that need smartening up, though.

GauntletWizard 13y ago
Why? Why would you do that to the world? Smart quotes are about the dumbest concept that has ever existed.
- omaranto 13y ago
  What's so dumb about them? Do you like your opening and closing parenthesis to be the same, too?
  - raldi 13y ago
    No, which is why they have separate keys on my keyboard, unlike smartquotes, so I can always easily specify exactly which I want. Also nobody magically switches my parentheses around out from under me.
    - oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
      There are many wonderful characters that don't have their own individual keys on your keyboard. Heck, there are a lot of characters that require at least one meta key to be pressed in combination with another key, and single quote marks are accessible in exactly that way on my keyboard too (Mac, YMMV). And, yes, autocorrect can be a PITA, especially when it's not actually getting things correct, but that's a different, albeit related, issue. We should really refer to quote marks, or apostrophe (which are often rendered as curly, and are the characters that autocorrect switches to), and the prime symbol (which is the unadulterated character that you get with the non-meta-pressed key on your keyboard), rather than using the term 'smart quotes'.
      - kps 13y ago
        Not to detract from the substance of your post, but the unshifted keyboard key pretty much universally generates an ASCII apostrophe (U+0027, '), not a prime (U+2032, ′, as used for feet and minutes, and while I'm babbling, the addition of a second prime for seconds is not a coincidence). ~~~~ wavy lines starting flashback ~~~~ ASCII 1967, in conjunction with its European counterpart ECMA-6, permitted the visual appearance of some characters, including the apostrophe, to be modified so that they could be used as accents when overstruck¹: ' " , ^ ` ~ ˊ ¨ ¸ ˆ ˋ ˉ (using the modern Unicode spacing modifiers) Later versions of ECMA-6 suggested that the accent interpretation be used only when the character was actually overstruck: In the 7-bit character set, some printing symbol may be designed to permit their use for the composition of ac- cented letters when necessary for general interchange of information. A sequence of three characters, comprising a letter, BACKSPACE and one of these symbols, is needed for this composition; the symbol is then regarded as a dia- critical sign. It should be noted that these symbols take on their diacritical significance only when they precede or follow the character BACKSPACE; for example, the symbol corresponding to the code combination 2/7 normally has the significance of APOSTROPHE, but becomes the diacritical sign ACUTE ACCENT when preceded or followed by the character BACKSPACE.² Although this was fine for the printing teletypes in use when ASCII was first designed, early video terminals were too dumb to handle overstrikes, so it never caught on. ¹Revised American Standard Code for Information Interchange, from http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html ²ECMA-6: 7-Bit coded Character Set, 4th Edition, August 1973, from http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-6,%204th%20Edition,%20August%201973.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ~~~~ wavy lines ending flashback ~~~~
        raldi 13y ago
        Please don't abuse tildes in this way; use the proper Unicode wavy-line character: ⌇
        cnvogel 13y ago
        But your wavy line has the wrong orientation... 2307 ⌇ WAVY LINE http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf What you most likely intended to present as an alternative is the... 301C 〜 WAVE DASH http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf unicode smiley ➩ ☺
    - deathanatos 13y ago
      They don't have a dedicated key, I suppose, (but then again, you have to hit <shift> to get parens…) but smart quotes are <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{ on OS X, and configured to be <compose>, <, " and <compose>, >, " on my Linux machine. Smart quote are a bit of a pain, but they do look nice. Really I prefer em dash, en dash, ellipses; I regret that OS doesn't have a keyboard entry for bullet. (Then, Linux doesn't either, other than entering in the code point directly with Ctrl+Shift+U or whatever it is.)
      - roryokane 13y ago
        On OS X, you can type a bullet • with <option>+8. You can also edit your keyboard layout to make certain characters possible or easier to type, using Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...) for OS X. I created a custom layout using Ukelele that makes typing smart quotes easier. With it, opening ‘ and closing ’ single smart quotes are <option>+[ and <option>+] instead of <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{, and double smart quotes “ ” are similarly more intuitive to type. I use it all the time. You can try it out yourself by downloading it from http://a.pomf.se/bipwcr.zip http://a.pomf.se/bipwcr.zip and moving the two files into “~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/”.
      - mattdw 13y ago
        option-8 on my mac keyboard is •.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  ‘Smart quotes’ are actually more typographically ‘correct’; that key on your keyboard is a prime symbol which is NOT the same as an apostrophe or a single quote mark. Apart from reducing ambiguity, they also look a lot nicer (in decent fonts), particularly at larger font sizes. I cringe when I see a prime (or ‘straight quote’) symbol being misused on TV or in print.
  - talmand 13y ago
    Just curious, how do you feel if a font, let's say it is a decent font, is designed to make the apostrophe look like a prime symbol?
- ygra 13y ago
  German Wikipedia uses proper quotes instead of the straight variety. I did a lot of wikignoming a while ago and fixing quotes (and non-breaking spaces, and citation formats) was among the things I did. Being able to quickly find straight quotes on the page is very helpful in that regard.

w1ntermute 13y ago

Meanwhile, Firefox continues to distinguish between e and é when searching, despite Chrome having fixed this bug years ago.

scott_karana 13y ago
Does it depend on the locale, perhaps?
reubenmorais 13y ago
> this bug "9001 Wrong Things Programmers Assume About Internationalization" This behavior should at a minimum be locale-aware. I would be surprised if Firefox did that by default in my pt-BR profile.
- chavesn 13y ago
  (I'm not programming this kind of thing so please forgive my ignorance.) Is that loose of a search not actually desirable in "find in page" instances? In other words, are there many words where 'e' matching 'é' would actually generate a false positive? This is the only case I could see that would be problematic. And even then "find in page" is usually used as quick navigation to the minimum matching search (high recall) and not about excluding all possible mismatches (high precision).
  - logicchains 13y ago
    There are words in other languages, French for instance, that with an accent changed or removed have completely different meaning.
    - bausson 13y ago
      That is sadly true. It's even worse than that. 'e' is the most used letter in french, but 'é' and 'è' are quite used too. 'ê' and 'ë' being rarer, but still existing. So, I am exaggerating it a bit, but you can compare it to having to search for words with the consonants, because every vowel is considered the same by your search algorithm. Yes, I'm pushing it, but you see the problem it can easily become in huge pages.

wbsun 13y ago

Ah, this is off topic and let me close it to show off my power... hmm, are we on SO?