Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?

On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 17:33:08 -0600, Jerry Friedman
wrote:

On 10/7/17 3:38 PM, harry newton wrote:
How can we convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on
Windows?
...

Since you posted to a.u.e., I thought I'd inform you of the original of
"dastard". It turned out to be different from what I expected, but here
it is anyway.

dastard (n.)
'mid-15c., "one who is lazy or dull;" an English formation on a
French model, probably from */dast/, "dazed," past participle of /dasen/
"to daze" (see /daze/ (v.)) + deprecatory suffix *-ard*. Meaning "one
who shirks from danger" is late 15c.'

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?...search=dastard

Someone might tell the North Koreans that "dastard" would be a more
precisely-applied insult than dotard; dazed and lazy or dull.

--
Rich Ulrich

In message , Wolf K
writes:
On 2017-10-08 13:32, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 17:11:10 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

Mayayana wrote:

ASCII is standard in all uses

Except when UK users want a pound sign £ and get a hash symbol # (yes I
realise Americans may call that a pound sign)
I was working with a customer about a year ago, helping him edit the
config file for a piece of his networking gear. He wanted to add a
comment, which in that case is signified by a line starting with the "#"
symbol.
I asked him to type a pound sign. He paused, scanning his keyboard
unsuccessfully, so I helpfully added, "Shift-3". He said, "Oh! You mean
a hashtag!"
Millennials... Thanks, Twitter!

)-:


# as "pound sign" is engineering usage. Learned it 61 years ago....
Also used kip to mean 1,000 lbs.

BTW, robo-instrictions to "enter account number" usually continue with
"... and the pound sign."

Not here. "Press the hash key".

I think the normal UK name for the # character is just "hash". (I think
hashtag comes from that: it's a tag which consists of the hash character
followed by some other characters.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If you bate your breath do you catch a lung fish? (Glynn Greenwood 1996-8-23.)

In message , Andy Burns
writes:
Mayayana wrote:

But isn't your pound sign encoded in the ANSI 128+ range?

It is, but back in the early 80's it was pretty common for printers to
have a DIP switch to flick between US and UK mode, so that ASCII code
35 printed a £ instead of a #

I think I also vaguely remember some printers being settable to print
the pound sign (by which I do _not_ mean #) when you told them to print
a $. (I don't think that was ever very popular, because among other
things $ was used a lot in programming languages then, and listings with
a lot of pound signs in them were confusing to say the least.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If you bate your breath do you catch a lung fish? (Glynn Greenwood 1996-8-23.)

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 23:30:52 +0000 (UTC), harry newton
wrote:

The problem is that my text editor (Gvim) isn't handling the dastardly
characters, so all I want to do is get rid of any character that any normal
text editor can't/won't/doesn't handle.

The obvious answer is to use another text editor, one that doesn't have
the problems that you object to. I use and recommend Notepad++.
[]
I repeat, though, the obvious answer is to use another text editor. If
Notepad++ isn't to your liking, many of my colleagues have settled on
Ultra Edit or Textpad, so you might give those a try.

It isn't just the choice of editor: some _applications_ where you might
want to use the text only accept seven-bit characters.

Closing thought, does GVIM let you choose a better character set, one
that includes symbols for the things that are currently not able to be
displayed?

(I don't know GVIM, but I'm pretty sure the answer is) No. It uses 94
printable/displayable characters (or 93 if you argue that space isn't
one of them).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If you bate your breath do you catch a lung fish? (Glynn Greenwood 1996-8-23.)

On 09/10/17 02:24, Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-10-08 10:41, Mayayana wrote:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

|Microsoft is one of the worst for that
| problem. They write pages intended for an English-speaking
| audience, in English, then use just a handful of unnecessary
| UTF-8 characters that break the ANSI continuity. It makes
| no sense.
|
| IMOSHO, it makes no sense, but then it is Microsoft. Which often
| seem to have a lot of "I'm sure it makes sense - not to me, but to
| someone" elements.
|

That's a generous view. I don't see a problem
with switching to UTF-8, but what MS are doing is
to deliberately and unnecessarily break ASCII
compatibility without any need to do so, by replacing
quotes and spaces with unicode characters in UTF-8.
It seems to be a kind of political correctness attitude.
Nearly all English pages can easily be both ASCII and
UTF-8.

I wonder how journalists type those quotes. Maybe
they have a software program that does the conversion?

ANSI = ASCII plus 128 to 255. Most ANSI codes have Unicode counterparts.

See
http://ascii-table.com/ansi-codes.php

The following quote from Wikipedia is accurate, to the best of my knowledge.

quote
The phrase ANSI character set has no official meaning and has been used
to refer to the following, among other things:

Windows code pages, a collection of 8-bit character sets compatible
with ASCII but incompatible with each other, especially those code pages
that are partly compatible with ISO-8859, most commonly Windows Latin 1
ASCII, a 7-bit character set. (Very rarely.)
ANSEL, the American National Standard for Extended Latin Alphabet
Coded Character Set. (Very rarely.)
ISO-8859, a collection of 8-bit character sets compatible with
ASCII. (Very rarely.)
/quote

In my experience the first is the most common meaning. It is the
character set that some Microsoft software calls ISO-8859-1, but which
is not compatible with the real ISO-8859-1, nor in fact with any ISO
character set. As such it is useful only for transmitting information
between Windows users, and apart from that use it has serious
portability issues. Not recommended for general use, mostly because of
the conflict with ISO-8859-1.

One might argue that Microsoft web pages are intended to be read only by
Windows users, but that's not entirely true. For example, I have had to
read them on my OS/2 computer when my Windows 10 computer locked up.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Peter Moylan wrote:

when my Windows 10 computer locked up.

Ouch.

I had that happen, with Imagemagick and the OpenMP library.

I re-ran the test case a couple days ago on the Win10 Insider
edition, and it was fixed! Only took a year.

So I take back what I said about them never fixing stuff.
Whether it was by accident or by design, it no longer
freezes for that test case.

The test case involves opening a 10GB .psb file with
Imagemagick and trying to display it. It's supposed to
say "out of memory" and it actually survives now to
report that. The image is a panorama with more than
4 billion pixels. Previously, it railed all the
cores on the CPU during one stage of the operation,
and there was no way to kill it (nothing on the
computer worked).

*******

In the Feedback Hub, I asked them for a Task Manager
that actually worked. I still haven't received a
response.

Paul

He who is J. P. Gilliver (John) said on Sun, 8 Oct 2017 16:58:57 +0100:

Word does that (by default - you can turn it off); if I type "Fred", it
will convert the quotes into the 66 and 99 form (I think it calls them
"smart quotes"). [I think it does the same with single quotes, 'Fred'.]
You can stop it doing it either by turning off the setting, or on a
one-off basis by doing an Undo (Ctrl-Z) immediately after typing the ".

I wouldn't be surprised if some web-page editing software behaves
similarly.

I tried Word ... and failed.

I was hoping I could paste into MS Word 2007 to have Word automatically
remove the curly quotes, replacing them with keyboard quotes (aka ASCII
quotes).

This article shows how to turn off the Microsoft Word default to convert
keyboard quotes into "smart quotes" (aka curly quotes).
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Change-curly-quotes-to-straight-quotes-and-vice-versa-017963A0-BC5F-486B-9C9D-0EC511A8FB8F

Here's a screenshot of the keyboard-to-smart quotes GUI in my Word 2007:
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes.jpg

But a test cut-and-paste of the original article into MS Word failed to
convert the curly quotes to keyboard quotes (or ASCII quotes).
http://theverge.com/2017/10/6/16437790/iphone-8-swollen-battery-issue-apple-investigating

It didn't work:
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes2.jpg

Since I don't know MS Word all that well I wonder aloud whether MS Word can
convert curly quotes to keyboard quotes.

If Microsoft Word can convert curly quotes to keyboard quotes, the issue
would be solved instantly.

Does anyone know if Word can convert those curly quotes to keyboard quotes?
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes2.jpg

He who is Ken Blake said on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 12:14:47 -0700:

To me, there are word processors (e.g. WordPerfect and Word), text
editors (e.g. Notepad) and *glorified* text editors (e, g. WordPad).

As far as I'm concerned, WordPad is a useless program. I don't need
anything in between a word processor and a text editor. Microsoft
probably provides WordPad for those people who don't want to spend the
money on a real word processor, but I think those people would be much
better off with Open Office or Libre Office.

I didn't know that using the word "text editor" would be construed as an
issue, so I apologize since even MS Word, Notepad, Adobe Acrobat Pro, or
say, The GIMP or PhotoShop can all be used as an "Editor of Text".

Since almost every program edits text, I don't think we want to go down the
path of defining whether Notepad is a bona-fide "text editor" (because in
my book, it's not a real text editor but in other people's books - it is -
where I just said EVERYTHING edits text so that argument would never end).

My text editor on Windows/Linux/Android is the standard vi clone.

I did supply a plethora of screenshots to show my text editing was in vi.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes2.jpg

What I *meant* by *text editor* is "pure text" or "real text" or whatever
it is called when all that formatting junk is removed leaving only the
characters on the screen that are on the keyboard itself.

The reason I'm using GVIM on Windows is that vi allows for quick edits.

He who is Char Jackson said on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 11:57:51 -0500:

I repeat, though, the obvious answer is to use another text editor. If
Notepad++ isn't to your liking, many of my colleagues have settled on
Ultra Edit or Textpad, so you might give those a try.

I'm looking for a solution for the cut-and-paste problem.
I have no problem cutting and pasting into an intermediary program.

In fact, I just tried MS Word as the intermediary; it failed.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes2.jpg

Why would NotePad++ work when MS Office failed?
Does NotePad++ have a special curly-quote-to-keyboard-quote macro?

On 09/10/17 04:53, Wolf K wrote:

# as "pound sign" is engineering usage. Learned it 61 years ago.... Also
used kip to mean 1,000 lbs.

US engineering use, I presume. Australian engineers would never call the
hash character a pound sign.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

"Peter Moylan" wrote

| Windows code pages, a collection of 8-bit character sets compatible
| with ASCII but incompatible with each other, especially those code pages
| that are partly compatible with ISO-8859
.....
|
| In my experience the first is the most common meaning. It is the
| character set that some Microsoft software calls ISO-8859-1, but which
| is not compatible with the real ISO-8859-1, nor in fact with any ISO
| character set. As such it is useful only for transmitting information
| between Windows users, and apart from that use it has serious
| portability issues.

Read my posts. ANSI is generally used to refer to
8-bit encoding using codepages. It's not just the
Windows English codepage. Look up code page.
Your system uses a code page to interpret characters
128+ in 8-bit/1 byte encoding. It started with ASCII,
which was all anyone needed. English characters.
When computing spread there was a need to accomodate
different languages. So 7-bit ASCII was adapted to
8-bit encoding, providing an extra 128 characters. Those
characters were then assigned according to code pages.
Your system uses a code page in accord with the language
you're using. That's what people call ANSI. 8-bit encoding
using a local codepage to define characters 128+.

It can sometimes get a bit sticky because there are
useful characters in the 128+ range of the English codepage.
Like curly quotes. And it used to be that those could be
used without worry because there was little mixing of languages
in computing. But as a result most people don't realize that
someone using another language won't see curly quotes
because their codepage will define those character values
differently. So it's not about compatibility between Windows
users.
(There's sometimes a similar problem with fonts. Not all
fonts display the same characters. Someone on Windows
might use a Wing Dings font to display astrological
symbols, for instance. But another windows user without
that font, or a Mac user, will probably see the character as
it's dispayed in Times New Roman or Helvetica, respectively.
Those fonts don't have astrological symbols. So Gemini,
say, will probably render as "d", "M", or some such.
People think it's just a character. But it's not that
standardized.


According to the Wikipedia page, the only encoding
officially designated by American National Standards Institute
(ANSI) was ASCII, but in general usage ANSI refers to
8-bit/1-byte encoding using codepages. That's a
very specific, defined kind of encoding. They can
say it's a "misnomer" to call it ANSI, but that's generally
what it's called. It's like calling a tissue a kleenex. The
Kleenex company might want to split hairs, but I don't
know anyone who says "facial tissue". And it helps to have
the popular ANSI definition because the whole range of
codepages, with 8-bit encoding, constitutes a single system
of encoding that's not the same as ASCII or unicode.

| One might argue that Microsoft web pages are intended to be read only by
| Windows users, but that's not entirely true.

Not at all. Plenty of people on Linux or Macs might
want to access Windows docs or may also have
Windows computers. Microsoft are not publishing their
pages as ANSI 1252.

*That's the problem that we've been talking about
in this thread.*

They're publishing them as UTF-8
to be international, and the rare non-ASCII characters
used cause problems for people who want to save the
text as ANSI, which is still the default for most purposes.

These days it's easy to save as UTF-8. Notepad
provides that option. (I think GVIM doesn't only because
it's meant for use as a code editor, not a text editor.)
Personally, though, I prefer to save as ANSI. (And
yes, Notepad calls it ANSI, too.) Despite that unicode
has become necessary, as an English speaker it's
almost never necessary for me, so I like to keep my
files all the same and not have to worry about which
is encoded how. And there's always a chance that
some software won't recognize UTF-8.

On 09/10/17 05:45, Mayayana wrote:
I don't say pound for #. It's used in things like price signs on
produce sometimes and people recognize it in context as meaning
pound, but I call it a hash sign. Microsoft, with their maddening
habit of misusing language in marketing, hijacked it to mean
"sharp". Of course in music it means that, but they named a
programming language C# and then insisted it must be pronounced "C
sharp".

The musical sharp sign (♯) looks a lot like the hash sign, but it's not
quite the same shape. Here they are side by side: ♯#

So that programming language is really "C hash", perhaps to suggest that
they made a hash of the design.

It's a sort of passive aggressive way of forcing people to describe
the language as superior. A play on C++.

Or D-.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I think I also vaguely remember some printers being settable to print
| the pound sign (by which I do _not_ mean #) when you told them to print
| a $. (I don't think that was ever very popular, because among other
| things $ was used a lot in programming languages then, and listings with
| a lot of pound signs in them were confusing to say the least.)

That's an interesting point. As far as I know all programming
languages are still in American English. I have the luxury of not
noticing until I download sample code from someone foreign
and see all the function names and keywords in English, but
with incomprehensible variable names. Like this snippet:

For i = 1 To MengeZeilen
ReDim Zeilenbuffer(ZL - 1)
CopyMemory Zeilenbuffer(0), Buffer(Bufferstand + 1), ZL

Seeing that I realize how hard it must be for foreigners
to learn programming. The language of the variable names
is apparently German, which makes it very difficult for me
to figure out what the code is doing, even though I understand
the function names, keywords and operators.

On 09/10/17 03:06, Mayayana wrote:

UTF-8 is a way to express unicode using single bytes.
Unicode-16, what's usually just referred to as unicode,
encodes thousands of characters in 2 bytes, so each character
can have its own specific encoding number in order to fit
English, Russian and everything else. ASCII and ANSI use
a one-byte-per-character encoding, except with a few
Asian languages.

Minor correction: Unicode has more than 2^16 code points, so you can't
express it using two bytes per character. (For full coverage you'd need
a 21-bit code.) An earlier version of Unicode did allow a 16-bit
representation, but that's now obsolete because it didn't cover the
characters of some languages.

There is an encoding of Unicode, called UTF-16, that can represent many
characters as single 16-bit codes, but for some characters it has to go
to using a sequence of two or more 16-bit "words". In that respect it is
similar to UTF-8, which also uses variable-length encoding.

UTF-16 is a very poor choice for most Western languages, because for
typical text it uses almost twice the space as UTF-8 does. It is,
however, a good choice for some Asian languages.

There is also an encoding called UTF-32, which is grossly inefficient
but which has the advantage that it doesn't need to be variable-length.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

On 09/10/17 03:06, Mayayana wrote:

The result is millions of people who equate their computer with MS
Office and assume the whole world also uses MS Office. They're the
people who send emails from Word or send a 60,000 byte DOC file to
communicate 1 sentence of 24 bytes.

One of our previous university Vice-Chancellors used to send out "all
staff" memos using MS-Word. There were times when his one-paragraph memo
became a 2 MB e-mail, sent to over a thousand recipients. With the
hardware of the day that probably put significant stress on the mail server.

Why as much as 2 MB for a short memo? Because apparently he didn't know
how to create a new MS-Word document, so he would take an existing
document, delete its content, and then type the new text. What he didn't
realise was that, with an unfortunate choice of options (it might even
be the default choice), the document contains a record of all changes.
This became obvious to those of us who didn't have MS-Word installed and
had to read the raw data.

What also became obvious was that he was leaking some very confidential
data.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia