[mb-users] Correct typography

Nikolai Prokoschenko nikolai at prokoschenko.de
Tue Sep 11 17:57:20 UTC 2007


Hello,

there was a time when MusicBrainz didn't know what Unicode was. Luckily, 
the times have changed and it's no problem now (given a proper 
filesystem) to keep all of your music properly tagged and named, even 
you have russian, chinese, english, latvian and some hebrew and korean 
tracks in your collection.

I'm a heavy user of PicardQt, so that about 80% of my music is MBIDed. 
Recently, I've added a two-liner to the PicardScripting wiki page which 
converts triple-dots to ellipsis, which is the correct typographical way 
to express what was meant by three dots. But then it stroke me: what is 
MusicBrainz's standing point considering typography in general? Would it 
be ok to "fix" triple-dots in the database, insert em-dashes and 
non-breakable spaces everyplace appropriate? It is rather 
straightforward to convert these characters to their replacements (e.g., 
'--' for the em-dash) in taggers and scripts while it definitely not as 
easy to convert the other way around (e.g. non-breakable spaces).

Any comments on this? I know I'm a Unicode freak, so bear with me :)

Greets,

Nikolai.




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