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Diacritics

French quotes (sometimes called "angle quotes") are noted the same way English quotes are noted in TeX, id est by " and ".

No effort has been put to preserve Latin ligatures (ae, oe) which are representable in several other charsets. So, these ligatures may be lost through Easy French conventions.

This is almost the French convention for simplified diacritics entry:

e'

Acute accent

e`

Grave accent

e^

Circumflex accent

e"

Diaeresis

c,

Cedilla

In some countries, : is used instead of " to mark diaeresis. recode support one convention on a single call, depending on the -c option of the recode command.

The convention is prone to loosing information, because the diacritic meaning overloads some characters that already have other uses. To alleviate this, some knowledge of the French language is insufflated into the recognition routines. So, the following subtleties are systematically obeyed by the various recognizers.

• A single quote which follows a e does not necessarily means an acute accent if it is followed by a single other one. For example:

  e'

  will give an e with an acute accent.

  e"

  will give a simple e, with a closing quotation mark.

  e"'

  will give an e with an acute accent, followed by a closing quotation mark.

  There is a problem induced by this convention if there are English citations with a French text. In sentences like:

  There's a meeting at Archie's restaurant.

  the single quotes will be mistaken twice for acute accents. So English contractions and suffix possessives could be mangled.

• A double quote or colon, depending on -c option, which follows a vowel is interpreted as diaeresis only if it is followd by another letter. But there are in French several words that end with a diaeresis, the program also recognizes them. See section List of words ending with diaeresis, for a study of all the problematic cases.

• A comma which follows a c is interpreted as a cedilla only if it is followd by one of the vowels a, o and u.

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