Apostrophe problem

Hello AsciiDoctor people, first time user of this interesting tool here. Unfortunately, the first thing I tried revealed a couple of niggles:

First, the plural possessive apostrophe, e.g. here:

  The Johnsons' house is next to Sam's.

does not render correctly—the first ASCII (typewriter) apostrophe remains in the output.  Of course, there may be situations in which an apostrophe and single quotation mark can be confused, but I don't think this is one, and in any case, converting to a true apostrophe seems a safer default than leaving the ASCII approximation.

Second, is there an option to produce plainer HTML? I have my browser configured to display using the fonts I find best for proof-reading, but the default HTML produced by asciidoctor overrides these.

Cheers, Rob

Hi Rob,

Your timing is perfect! I've been reviewing how Asciidoctor handles substitutions for the past few days.

I took your use case and ran Asciidoctor through its paces. Upon further digging, I've come to the conclusion that the only time the apostrophe is replaced is when it is bounded by two characters (Sam's).
In no other case, such as the plural possessive, does it get replaced by &# 8217;.

You can see pictures of the raw .adoc I wrote, the raw html output, and the rendered webpage below.







The current work around with Asciidoctor 0.1.4 is to replace the ' with the {rsquo} attribute: Johnsons{rsquo}.

However, @mojavelinux filed an issue due to your question and has already submitted a pull request.
Please feel free to add to the issue and review the pull request.

Your issue also brought up the question of, in this day and age, should single quotes and double quotes be replaced with their smart versions by default? What do you think?

As for a simpler stylesheet, currently there isn't one available out of the box. However, you can view your rendered document without the default stylesheet by unsetting the stylesheet attribute either via the command line (-a stylesheet!) or in the doc header (:stylesheet!:). The community probably has some other (and better) suggestions.

BTW, I'm interested in the styles/look-and-feel you'd like a proof-reading stylesheet to exhibit. I believe others in the community have expressed interest in a similar type of stylesheet, so it sounds like including one in Asciidoctor would be useful to a lot of people.

Cheers,
Sarah

> However, @mojavelinux filed an issue due to your question and has already submitted a pull request.
> Please feel free to add to the issue and review the pull request.

Great, that looks like it should do the trick :)

> Your issue also brought up the question of, in this day and age, should single
> quotes and double quotes be replaced with their smart versions by default?
> What do you think?

In general, I don't think the ASCII straight quote characters should be passed unmodified to the output unless explicitly asked for, by escaping, etc.  The pull-request has identified the 'feet' abbreviation as an exception—this isn't strictly correct, the feet symbol is the 'prime' character (a sort of slanted, but uncurved apostrophe), but I agree it may be better to pass it through than to change it to a true apostrophe in this case.

DocBook actually defines in-line quotations as being structural (similar to emphasis, etc.), thus allowing more flexibility for presentation, but I think that's a step beyond my needs at the moment.

> As for a simpler stylesheet, currently there isn't one available out of the
> box. However, you can view your rendered > document without the default
> stylesheet by unsetting the stylesheet attribute either via the command
> line (-a stylesheet!)

Perfect, thanks!

> BTW, I'm interested in the styles/look-and-feel you'd like a proof-reading
> stylesheet to exhibit. I believe others in the community have expressed
> interest in a similar type of stylesheet, so it sounds like including one in
> Asciidoctor would be useful to a lot of people.

I think it probably depends on the document type and it's complexity. For my first run with Asciidoctor—writing a short  article—stylesheet-less is fine for proof-reading, but if I have any ideas for more complex situations, I'll let you know.

Thanks for the speedy responses, Rob.