Quotation marks differ, and so should your software

The straight quotation mark " on a keyboard is a typewriter compromise: one key for opening, closing and inches. Typeset text has two marks, and which two depends on the language. A tool that turns " into “ and ” has solved the problem for English readers only.

What the engine sets

The pack for each language lists its marks by nesting level. A few, from the generated language pages:

The table is a summary. The language pages hold the exact marks per level, the sources each pack was written from, and the status: no pack has been read by a native speaker yet. They were written from published style guides, and some of those could only be read in part. Where the engine and the Unicode CLDR data disagree (English, German, French, Swiss German), the sources registry marks the decision disputed rather than hiding it.

Registers

The engine has two registers. display, the default, is for marketing and interface text. literary is for book-like text and has its own rules for English (British ‘…’ with “…” inside) and Ukrainian. A language without a literary profile falls back to display.

Reading what you wrote

The input may already be curly, low, straight or guillemets, in any mix. The engine reads all of them, pairs them, and sets the marks of the language and level. It handles an apostrophe (we're, п'ять) differently from a closing single quote, and does not take an inch mark (5") for a quotation.

That last case is the hard one, and the backlog is honest about it: a quotation glued to a digit (5"a") and an inch mark inside a quotation (a 5" hole) are limits we have listed rather than guessed at.

Try it

Open the playground, pick a language, and paste a paragraph with quotations in it. The Changes tab shows each mark that changed and the rule behind it.

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