Re: Smart quotes via finite state machine

[Douglas McIlroy]

A word  of caution. AI is a dangerous tool. "Smart" features abound in
Microsoft Word and its imitators. They are neat when they work, but can be
extremely frustrating when they go wrong. Whenever one bites, you have to
cook up a special trick--or a whole new layout--to get past it.

A common example is automatic capitalization of the first letter of a
"paragraph" (i.e. text that follows a newline character). Mere backspacing
and retyping to get a lowercase letter doesn't solve the problem.

That said, I do benefit from the smart quotes in Libre Office, and don't
recall having trouble with them. This is probably the result of knowing
from experience when to reach for special characters. I'm not sure a
beginner would fare as well.

Because the state diagram is complex, it may be hard for a user to see
what's up when it does make a mistake.

I infer that open-quot-space has two purposes: (1) to allow a single space
to be quoted, as might happen in a language manual, and (2) to cater for
the inch sign attached to a number. Back-transitions to this state seem to
let in some strange behaviors.

Doug