[Python-Dev] The docs, reloaded (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Wed May 23 17:00:27 CEST 2007

Nick Craig-Wood wrote:

``comment'' produces smart quotes in latex if I remember correctly. You probably want to convert it somehow because it looks a bit odd on the web page as it stands. I'm not sure what the reST replacement might be, but converting it just to "comment" would probably be OK. Likewise with `comment' to 'comment'.

For an example see the first paragraph here:

http://pydoc.gbrandl.de/reference/index.html

What latex does here for typeset output is nice, but it's also a bit of a hack job. The ` and ' characters aren't smart, the fonts just have curved glyphs for them. `` and '' are mapped to additional glyphs using ligatures, again part of the font information.

The result, of course, is really nice. :-)

Scott Dial wrote:

In fairness to Georg, latex2html also misses the smart quotes. See the same paragraph here:

http://docs.python.org/ref/front.html

There's a way to make latex2html do "the right thing" for these, except... it then happily does so even to ` and '' (and `` and '') in code samples, since there's no equivalent to the font information used to handle this in latex.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr.

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