Discourse quote mangling - do we want that?

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1

Dear All,

I recently tried to copy and past a few shell commands into a posting, that contained single and double straight quotes. To my surprise discourse mangled/replaced these with typographic quotes, it seems that this is a new default for non-preformatted text.

Standard text:
"hello world"

Blockquote:

"hello world"

Preformatted text:

"hello world"

While arguably nicer looking*, the typographic quotes have the issue that they do not have the same meaning as their straight brethren if pasted into a shell.
Now one could argue that folks should simply learn to always tag their shell commands as preformatted text; but I would counter that the quote mangling only has minor cosmetic
advantages (and only for those who consider a) straight quotes as significantly uglier than typographic ones and b) do not want to configure their OS to do the quote mangling for them); while at the same time the noted disadvantage that copying from forum posts might lead to non-functional pastes into a command line. (And depending on font size/font type the differences might be subtle enough to be easily overlooked).

So here is my question for the forum elders:
Could we please try to disable that well-intended feature simply because its side effects seem unfortunate for a forum with both high technical/shell-related content and potentially enthusiastic but still green behind the ears users (who might not remember proper formatting all text elements accordingly)? Thank you very much in advance.

*) Honestly the biggest advantage of typographic quotes IMHO is that they differ for start and end and hence allow nested quotes, but honestly how often does one need to nest them...

2

We might disable the quote mangling, if possible. Like you say, those mangled quotes easily cause problems.

I guess @tmomas or @jow could toggle that setting, if there even is a setting for that.

3

These are all looking the same to me on my desktop PC:
grafik

Only when accessing this topic via mobile phone I see a difference.

I disabled this setting now:
grafik

Standard text:
“hello world”

“hello world”

.... this is sick.

1 Like
4

Thank you very much, I see from your picture that the markdown typographer does even more non-shell compatible modifications, like merging -- into an emdash (which seems dangerous given that GNU long options for the command line all start with --). Again thank you very much.

5

Thanks guys - looks good to me 2.

6

Hopefully it got fixed -- no strange "quotes", (c)

But apparently the already written messages remain mangled, so the mangling is done at the message sending phase?

7

Yes, the mangling is done on input/submission or think of it as a normalization process before stashing in the DB. Since it is a posting option and not a rendering choice things are as they were.

If you are looking for a "per-user" display option, you might want request it upstream.

8

Definitely not :slight_smile:
Hopefully mangling remains off permanently.

1 Like