Overriding the characters for beginning and ending smart quotes #138

I am playing with Pollen for making a book in Urdu, which is a right-to-left (RTL) language.

When using Pollen's smart-quotes function, the quotes (obviously) come off wrong, because for Urdu (or for other RTL languages), their order should be opposite to what works with American English (i.e. ” should be the beginning quote and “ should be the ending one).

So I was wondering if some setup values for quotes could be introduced, which the users can then override for specifying the characters for single/double beginning/ending quotes. Besides RTL languages, these could also be useful for a variety of other quote combinations.

I am playing with Pollen for making a book in Urdu, which is a right-to-left (RTL) language. When using Pollen's `smart-quotes` function, the quotes (obviously) come off wrong, because for Urdu (or for other RTL languages), their order should be opposite to what works with American English (i.e. `”` should be the beginning quote and `“` should be the ending one). So I was wondering if some [setup values](http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/Setup.html) for quotes could be introduced, which the users can then override for specifying the characters for single/double beginning/ending quotes. Besides RTL languages, these could also be useful for a [variety of other quote combinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table).

Certainly it would be easy to update smart-quotes to accept optional arguments that let you set the replacements. Would that suffice?

(I try to mint new setup values sparingly. They’re necessary for situations where a value needs to be used in multiple, difficult-to-reach places in the code. But smart-quotes, by contrast, is used directly in a decoder, so it seems simpler to just change its interface.)

Certainly it would be easy to update `smart-quotes` to accept optional arguments that let you set the replacements. Would that suffice? (I try to mint new setup values sparingly. They’re necessary for situations where a value needs to be used in multiple, difficult-to-reach places in the code. But `smart-quotes`, by contrast, is used directly in a decoder, so it seems simpler to just change its interface.)

(I try to mint new setup values sparingly. They’re necessary for situations where a value needs to be used in multiple, difficult-to-reach places in the code. But smart-quotes, by contrast, is used directly in a decoder, so it seems simpler to just change its interface.)

Makes sense. Changing the interface of smart-quotes to accept optional arguments can work too, yes.

However, being a Racket newbie, here's a follow-up question: how can I pass arguments to smart-quotes (or any other function) while building a txexpr like below?

(txexpr 'root empty (decode-elements elements
    #:txexpr-elements-proc decode-paragraphs
    #:string-proc (compose1 smart-quotes smart-dashes)))

Would I have to do something like this?

(txexpr 'root empty (decode-elements elements
    #:txexpr-elements-proc decode-paragraphs
    #:string-proc (compose1 my-smart-quotes smart-dashes)))

(define (my-smart-quotes x)
    (smart-quotes x #:beginning-quote "”" #:ending-quote "“"))

> (I try to mint new setup values sparingly. They’re necessary for situations where a value needs to be used in multiple, difficult-to-reach places in the code. But smart-quotes, by contrast, is used directly in a decoder, so it seems simpler to just change its interface.) Makes sense. Changing the interface of `smart-quotes` to accept optional arguments can work too, yes. However, being a Racket newbie, here's a follow-up question: how can I pass arguments to `smart-quotes` (or any other function) while building a `txexpr` like below? ``` (txexpr 'root empty (decode-elements elements #:txexpr-elements-proc decode-paragraphs #:string-proc (compose1 smart-quotes smart-dashes))) ``` Would I have to do something like this? ``` (txexpr 'root empty (decode-elements elements #:txexpr-elements-proc decode-paragraphs #:string-proc (compose1 my-smart-quotes smart-dashes))) (define (my-smart-quotes x) (smart-quotes x #:beginning-quote "”" #:ending-quote "“")) ```

Yes, exactly — make a helper function that sets the extra arguments.

All right. Thanks. :-)

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Overriding the characters for beginning and ending smart quotes #138