It would be very nice if the keyboard could automatically swap out typewriter glyphs like
'' "" ...
for their proper typographical counterparts, like
‘’ “” …
Apple does this as well in iOS, where it’s apparently called ‘smart punctuation’.
Of course, it should be possible to disable this for people who really need to make the typewriter glyphs show up as such, such as for programming purposes.
uhm… I hate this from apple to be honest, especially with the ellipsis, which is meant to be 3 distinct characters, not one.
I wish we didn’t want to resemble apple and android so much, a lot of the UI has sadly gone that way and it makes the OS more difficult to manage. But hey!
The ‘smart quotes’, as MS calls them, have been screwing up forums and plain-text emails for years. It certainly shouldn’t be the default. What’s the benefit?
Elipsis is a more useful character, but should not be substituted for 3 dots by default IMO.
It would be most useful if the default quote key would adapt based on the current context. I.e. “shift+2” shows an opening typographical quotation mark by default but changes to a closing one when necessary. The typewriter characters would still be available on the symbols page, so everyone who likes them more could still use them.
Another idea would be to automatically add opening and closing marks when pressing the quotation mark key, then place the cursor in between (""" -> ““<cursor>””). The same could be done for brackets. Deleting the last character should delete both inserted characters if nothing has been added in between.
It tried to implement this in a patch some time ago which did not work as expected because I didn’t find a way to change the cursor position. This should be easy to implement in Jolla’s keyboard backend, I suppose.
Screwing them up in what way?
There are still forums, and their underlying databases, that don’t handle unicode reliably:
e.g https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=162975
… which I would consider a bug ;).
Why not implement some kind of “smartness” in the keyboard while still allowing to type all characters? Both typographical punctuation and ASCII have their place.
Lack of foresight when the forum was started in 1996.