Core

I am not able to reproduce this issue.

In what browser does it occur?

What is the charset of the BE (assuming this is happening in the BE)?

With Firefox 3.6.3 in the BE.

Hmm, was iso-8859-1.
I just checked that with a utf-8 BE, but I only get high quotes there, too...

Some setting I missed?

I just saw these wrong quotation marks and thought inserting low quotation marks must be possible.
But now I tested that with Firefox with several sites (some non-TYPO3) and it seems that for me it does not work at all...

You say that works for you, Stan?

Well, I don't how you insert these low quotes in the RTE. I don't have low quotes on my keyboard. But if I use the insert special character dialogue or if I paste them in the RTE, then they are correctly saved and displayed in the BE and correctly rendered in FE. I tried with both single and double bottom quotes.

I just type them using Shift+2. (Inserting them as special characters works, but is not very comfortable.)
Since my BE User uses German as BE language, it would be great, if these quotes could be converted to the right format automatically.

On my keyboard SHIFT+2 produces a "standard" double quote. If insertion of a bottom quote as special character is working correctly, then there is not much we can do.

I think this is a matter of keyboard configuration.

On Windows, if you have a numeric pad on your keyboard, it is said that you can enter the bottom opening double quote (U+201E) by pressing NUM.LOCK and, while holding the ALT key, pressing 0132. I just tried this procedure with a keyboard with numeric pad and it works as advertised, although somewhat cumbersome...

Maybe we could have a feature that would allow to configure hot keys that would insert special characters.

If you have this issue, then you must have it also in OpenOffice or MS Word, no?

Thanks for the keyboard shortcut! For (X)HTML you can get the sign by using & bdquo ;.
Btw: This produces a "styled" quotation mark while & quot ; just gives a straight one. The difference might be visible depending on the font you use.
Correct styled quotes for german language would be
- opening: & bdquo ; or in the RTE Alt+0132
- closing: & ldquo ; or in the RTE Alt+0147

My keyboard is just a standard model. In the system control panel under "Regions" -> "Languages" -> "Details" it says that it uses German as Input Scheme. The rest is put to German, too.

With that, it works correctly in Microsoft Word.
When I press Shift+2 there, the quotation mark is displayed at the top for some milliseconds and then is replaced by a low quotation mark automatically.
If the RTE could do it that way, that would be the easiest solution for editors.

Yes, that works also in OpenOffice, but in no other application, not even IE8.

I wonder where such behaviours are documented. I wonder how we could support such behaviours for any langage.

I am changing this issue to a feature request.

...It also is about the high quotation mark.... Sorry, I just noticed that when viewing the sourcecode of an affected page.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#quotes

Add the following to your content stylesheet:

q:lang(de) { quotes: "„" "”" }

You need to enter the correct quoting characters.

Using EM, enable additional inline elements in the RTE.

Enable the quotation button in the RTE toolbar (or use Demo default configuration).

Set the keyboard entry language to DE.

In the RTE, select the text you want to quote. Click on the q button.

The text is quoted the way you want at least in Firefox (I am not sure about the support of this css property in every browser).

utf-8 encoding (including for the css file) may be required for this to work.

Is this a solution?

Hmm, yes, I think this works.

But what this issue is about is a further usability improvement:
I know that you can already do it:
- You can insert a special character by clicking on the according button.
- You can mark the text and quote it by clicking on the quote button.
Both works. But I am looking for a possibility, where the editor has to do nothing than typing the quotation mark. An automatic conversion.

I read more about the topic:
It seems like there already is a script in Textile, which can replace standard characters by special ones.
Here is their homepage: http://textile.thresholdstate.com/
The script you see there works for english quotation marks, but basically this can be adopted for any other language (French or German...).
Can this (or better the way how that works) be integrated somehow?

The problem is that the quotes to use will depend on the language. Where will we find the standard for quoting in any language?

There is a list on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark,_non-English_usage#Overview
But that is no "official" page... Also I don't know if it will be possible to cover "all" languages...

What about adding an option, where people can enter the code of the signs they want?

Obviously, it is exactly the purpose of the css quotes property to handle this.

I will put this on the to-do list for TYPO3 4.5. Maybe it is possible to generate the markup when SHIFT+2 is hit.

Heh, you are right. :-)

The idea to generate the markup automatically when SHIFT+2 is hit sounds good.

I suppose that you would raise the same issue with the blockquote elements? But in that case, since the author does not enter the quotes himself, the css approach should resolve the issue. That is blockquote:lang(de) { quotes: "„" "”" }

Another issue: Suppose the author wants to talk about html syntax and how to quote attributes in html. Then you would not want the quotes to be modified.... I wonder how you do it in Microsoft Word or Open Office.

MS Word uses an option to (de)activate styled quotes.
In Word 2007 you find it at:
Word Options --> Proofing --> AutoCorrect Options --> AutoFormat as you type --> First option: "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes"