[BRLTTY] Contracted English braille error and patch: O'clock

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Lee Maschmeyer on 2014/04/11 at 16:29 -0400]

>Here's a fix for the right single quote being used in the word "o'clock".

I wouldn't like to do it that way. The fact is that there are other apostrophes 
as well, e.g. the full width apostrophe. The solution needs to be more general.

The problem is actually far worse than a few versions of the apostrophe. For 
example, the entire alphabet is duplicated for various fonts, e.g. full width, 
mathematical bold, mathematical italic, mathematical bold italic, mathematical 
script, mathematical bold script, mathematical fraktur, mathematical 
double-struck, mathematical bold fraktur, mathematical sans-serif, mathematical 
sans-serif bold, mathematical sans-serif italic, mathematical sans-serif bold 
italic, and mathematical mono-space.

To do it right, we should support all contractions regardless of which flavour 
of any given letter is used. Explicitly respecifying our entire list of 
contraction rules for each possible combination wouldn't be good. I'll think 
about what we can do in order to efficiently resolve this problem in a general 
way.

>The problems with these quote signs are myriad. Here's a chapter title. Turn 
>off grade 2:
>
>,,julia',s ,,plot ,,6,,br1k ,,fanny',s ,,5gage;t
>
>Note the extra capital signs.

This is also a defficiency in the way that blocks of capitals have been 
implemented. Before I tackle that one, though, I do have a question. Is "to 
the" capitalized the right way, above, or, since the two words are joined 
together, should there be just one ,, sign?

>BTW, I asked a sighted friend about the right single quote. She has a
>certain amount of proofreading experience, having worked for TV Guide
>for awhile. According to her, the right single quote and apostrophe
>are virtually indistinguishable. Whether all sighted people would
>agree I don't know. For what it may or may not be worth...

All evidence is worth considering. In the end, the issue is: Should we 
rigorously follow the rules that are expected of a good Unicode processor or 
should we break the rules in order to accommodate understandable but incorrect 
things that careless people do? The reality, in this particular case, is that 
we're dealing with a bug in the text by someone who (probably) tried to be too 
clever.

In any event, as stated above, I'll try to figure out a good way to handle the 
fact that multiple characters can mean the same thing. I also have no problem 
with treating a mis-placed closing single quote (beginning or middle of a word) 
as an apostrophe. This leaves us with what to do with a right single quote at 
the end of a word. Since that's the correct place for that character to appear, 
my preference would be to not allow it to be treated as an apostrophe.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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