Smart quotes in languages other than English

Report · Jan 20, 2010

Hi to all,

As a technical writer, I deal with texts in several languages. One of the problems I have with FrameMaker, is that French and German "smart" (or "typographic") quotes are not entered automatically. Quotation marks remain in the English format. The solutions offered in Adobe's Knowledge Base are less than optimal:

- Replacing the way FrameMaker writes smart quotes in the Maker.ini file is made on a general base, and not per language.

- Manually entering all quotation marks cannot be done easily when you receive a text from others.

Is there a viable solution to this problem?

Paolo

Report · Jan 20, 2010

Paolo,

One way would be to create a small custom config file for each specific language that modifies the definition of the standard double-quote characters used for the Smart quotes. The definition for the standard characters in cmds.cfg (in the \fminit\configui folder) is:

where the Definition parameter specifes the hex value (i.e. character in the FrameRoman encoding) to use for the character that you wish to display in FM.

For the French, version create a file with those two entries (call it French_smartquotes.cfg) and change the hex values to the appropriate language-specific quote, i.e. guillemotleft is \xc7 and guillemotright is \xc8. Likewise for the German.

Then, when you need to work in any of theose languages, use View > Menus > Modify... and select the appropriate .cfg file. This will then temporarily change the mapping for the double-quote characters such that when you enter them from the keyboard, the appropraite language specific quote will be used. To switch languages, simply select another .cfg file using the View > Menus > Modify... The setting only persists for the current FM session.

The alternative is to edit the maker.ini file to enable the language specific smart quotes, listed in the [Spelling] section. The entry is:

; Smart Quote Characters
; SmartQuotes \xd4\xd5\xd2\xd3 ) English curved quotes
; SmartQuotes \xe2\xd4\xe3\xd2 ) German-style quotes with base quotes
; SmartQuotes \xd5\xd5\xc7\xc8 ) French-style quotes using guillemets
; SmartQuotes \xd5\xd5\xd3\xd3 ) Swedish- and Finnish-style quotes
; SmartQuotes \xd4\xd5\xd2\xd3 ) Italian curved quotes
;
; English curved quotes:
SmartQuotes=‘’“”

Delete the ";" at the front to un-comment the appropriate entry and add a ";" to the english one.

However, this route requires you to close FM every time yo uwish to make a change.

Report · Jan 20, 2010

Arnis, Thank you for your hint. The first route seems to be practical enough. I have already excluded the first one, since it would be a hassle (I would often have to reboot Frame each time I edit a different column or paragraph).

I'm surprised smart quotes are not tied to the languages, that is a property of each paragraph style. It would be great if Frame could do as Nisus Writer (probably OpenOffice does it, too?), where each language has its own type of automatic smart quotes.

Paolo

Report · Jan 20, 2010

"I'm surprised smart quotes are not tied to the languages"

Consider putting in a feature request at:

http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

Report · Jan 20, 2010

Good hint. Filed.