[mb-users] Correct typography

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 9/11/07, Nikolai Prokoschenko <nikolai at prokoschenko.de> wrote:
> 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 :)

For the record, I would like some smarter typography in the data. Some
things would be relatively easy to decide on, like correct quotes and
ellipsis (this can be done automatically). But I'm wary of opening
another styling can of worms. There are lots of funny little cases
where it's not obvious what to do, and I just know we'll have endless
issues.

Take your last example, dashes: last time I counted there were at
least a dozen dashes in Unicode. Most of them have a relatively clear
meaning, but I shiver to think how we're going to argue if Artist X
(invented name) actually intended to express a relationship or a break
in thought in the song "Bliss - Despair" (invented title); note that
both are possible here if you look the right way at it.

I also anticipate endless discussions between fans of the Chicago
Manual of Style, The Oxford Guide to Style, people with strong
personal beliefs and guys from all over the world who know very
different rules. Also I anticipate lots of "fixing" guillemots to
quotes, and a RFC on which kinds of quoting a French quote in an
English text (and vice-versa) should be surrounded by. (English ones,
I think.) And a lot of arguing on "should we put hair-spaces around
em-dashes" (I disagree), "we should put non-break spaces before
en-dashes" (I agree), etc.

But yeah, in general I agree we should improve a bit the typography ;)

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.