[Python-Dev] The docs, reloaded

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

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.   <fdrake at acm.org>