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DavidCrowe1-Visitor
1-Visitor
August 6, 2012
Question

Apostrophe substitution when printing

  • August 6, 2012
  • 6 replies
  • 1419 views
Please bear with me. I'm an Arbortext novice, having recently joined a department with long-established procedures that I'm trying to get to grips with.

My colleagues have noticed a change in behaviour between Arbortext 5.4 and 6.0 in the printing of apostrophes.

In version 5.4, the straight, "typewriter" apostrophe (U+0027) output to both print and PDF as a "curly" apostrophe (U+2019). This suited us, since the print edition looked correct, but the HTML version retained the straight apostrophe, making searches more reliable.

(I should add that we publish partly in French, where there are a lot of apostrophes.)

Under version 6.0, straight apostrophes print as just that. To get a curly apostrophe we have to use the proper code - although as far as I can tell, whatever means we use to enter it, Arbortext represents it using the ’ entity. It looks fine on screen and in print, but messes up searches.

This could be considered "correct" behaviour, of course. It's just that we had been used to taking advantage of the earlier "incorrect" behaviour.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is there anything we can do to change it, or do we have to update our search routine?

(By the way, we have a case open with PTC on the issue, but they are taking some time to respond.)

David Crowe

    6 replies

    B
    BobSpangenburg1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    August 16, 2012

    David,


    This is caused by character substitution during publishing. There is a command that you can put in your initializtion of PE to turn this functionality off. I would put it in an ACL you have in your "init" customization folder. The command is:


    set composedcharactersubstitution = off ;

    This command will eliminate the substitution of characters such as the quotes. You'll get the type of quote you have in the document sent to PE rather than PE substituting them after the fact.


    Hope this helps,


    Bob



    In Reply to David Crowe:


    Please bear with me. I'm an Arbortext novice, having recently joined a department with long-established procedures that I'm trying to get to grips with.

    My colleagues have noticed a change in behaviour between Arbortext 5.4 and 6.0 in the printing of apostrophes.

    In version 5.4, the straight, "typewriter" apostrophe (U+0027) output to both print and PDF as a "curly" apostrophe (U+2019). This suited us, since the print edition looked correct, but the HTML version retained the straight apostrophe, making searches more reliable.

    (I should add that we publish partly in French, where there are a lot of apostrophes.)

    Under version 6.0, straight apostrophes print as just that. To get a curly apostrophe we have to use the proper code - although as far as I can tell, whatever means we use to enter it, Arbortext represents it using the ’ entity. It looks fine on screen and in print, but messes up searches.

    This could be considered "correct" behaviour, of course. It's just that we had been used to taking advantage of the earlier "incorrect" behaviour.

    Has anyone else noticed this? Is there anything we can do to change it, or do we have to update our search routine?

    (By the way, we have a case open with PTC on the issue, but they are taking some time to respond.)

    David Crowe
    D
    DavidCrowe1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    August 16, 2012
    Thanks for the tip. I’ll see what I can do with it.

    In fact we want the substitution: straight quote on screen and in HTML, curly quote in printed output. Cock-eyed, I know, but it’s just the way everything has worked up to now. (I did get an answer to the case I posted with PTC, who confirmed that the behaviour changed in 5.4 F000.)

    But I might be able to do something with the composedcharactersubstitution setting.

    David


    D
    DavidCrowe1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    September 11, 2012
    For the record, in case anyone else is looking to control this obscure behaviour, there is a setting in Advanced Preferences.

    Set composedcharactersubstitution to off to print straight apostrophes as straight apostrophes (default from 5.4 on).
    Set to on to substitute the curved apostrophe in print (and PDF) for a straight apostrophe on screen.
    A
    AndyEsslinger1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    September 11, 2012
    Thanks for the information David.

    Interesting that it is the astrophe they are discussing in the help screen. You may think I'm kidding, but I've always wondered what the phrase: some ASCII characters meant.

    People that write help screens know too much about their subject to be any good at it. When I read this I just figured that the table was broken since I didn't see anything that I could relate to as a table. Since you mention it I can now see the apostrophe and grave characters in the lists at the bottom of the help screen (still don't see a table). Perhaps the help writer thought the word "apostrophe" was obscene in some manner or maybe the help writers were having a contest that day to see who could be the most obscure.


    set composedcharactersubstitution
    set composedcharactersubstitution= {on | off}
    This option specifies whether the composition engine will replace some ASCII characters with their typographical equivalents.
    When composedcharactersubstitution is set to on, the characters get replaced by their typographical equivalents as described in the following tables. The replacements only happen when not within elements that have the allowCharacterSubstitution control set to off in the .dcf file.
    When composedcharactersubstitution is set to off, ASCII characters are never replaced in any context.
    Replacements never occur when composing using XSL-FO.
    Win_125x fonts:
    ’ (39) -> 146
    ` (96) -> 145
    Unicode fonts:
    ’ (0x27) -> 0x2019
    ` (0x60) -> 0x2018

    Thanks again
    -Andy

    \ / Andy Esslinger LM Aero – Tech Order Data
    ______-/\-______ (817) 279-0442 1 Lockheed Blvd, MZ 4285
    \_\/_/ (817) 777-3047 Fort Worth, TX 76108-3916

    D
    DavidCrowe1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    September 11, 2012
    Yes, my colleague also found this help screen – but only after I discovered the composedcharactersubstitution setting. Obscure indeed.

    And what is “composed” about these characters? Perhaps the very old use of the grave and the (straight) apostrophe to simulate double quotes, alluded to in this Wikipedia article<?">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Computing>? (Which says, incidentally that this technique is still used in TeX.)


    E
    ebenton1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    September 11, 2012
    Those are the same guys who try to be helpful by setting the launch of a function to CTRL-ALT-F4-DELETE.
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