Leaderboard

Just to add fuel to the fire, I will add that "" can be problematic. It's a quote in English and in the dawn of time (computer time, that is), programmers figured it would be a good sign to quote strings. This mean "This is a line" will leave out the "" in the string itself. Writing ""This is a line"" will end the string at the second " and cause an error. The way to write the line in a way the computer would understand would be "\"This is a line\"". However it could also be written "「This is a line」". However this only goes for " and this would also be accepted by the computer "“This is a line”". For easier comparison: "\"This is a line\"" "「This is a line」" "“This is a line”" Next problem is that most VNs use Japanese locale and as such use the shift-jis encoding (or rather Microsoft's codepage 932, which is virtually identical). This mean that not all characters are available. More specifically whatever is used should be available here Microsoft's cp932 page for 0x81 leading byte. Being aimed at Japanese text, they didn't include “”, but row 60, column 05 to 08 looks useful, or at least as close as one can get to what you asked for. Leaving technical reasons aside, I do actually like the 「」signs. I think they look decent. I just wish they were available with a character width, which didn't provide so much whitespace around them. However they seem to be made to match a default kanji width to make kanji line up vertical. There is nothing we can do about the width, other than making a custom font.

I see the inclusion of 「」 Japanese quotation marks as simply an extension of fan translation weabooism that thinks including as much Japanese in the translation as possible makes it somehow more authentic.

Entirely valid point. And handling annoying text transformations like these is why God invented Perl. And Perl hackers. Those characters would seem to be exactly what the doctor ordered, in fact. And since it looks like one of my teams has found my blog — hi! — it's probably a good time to add the standard disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of Darbury Laine. They do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any projects he may be involved in, nor of good and decent people in general. Furthermore, Antwerp is not a sexual position.

So, to be clear, you're suggesting that no quotation marks should be used in ADV format, right? I had been considering how to broach exactly that suggestion, inside actual dialogue text, for my current project which is an ADV, so a little explicit support in advance for that wouldn't go unappreciated.

I'd like to point out something also. Only Americans use the double quotation marks for speech. All my physical books (well, I'm not going to check all of them) use single quotation marks for dialogue because they were printed outside of the US. Americans use the double quotes (") for quotations and single quotes (') for quotations inside a quotation, but British punctuation guidelines suggest the opposite - single quotes for quotations and double quotes for quotations inside a quotation. I know what you're all thinking and I agree, the British format is obviously superior and I really don't know why the Americans like to be contrary Just checked my Kindle and the punctuation between books is a total mish-mash *wrinkles nose*. Observe: “The marquis has arrived, sir.” (The Theft of Swords) ‘Initiating VKT ranging, cross-match RL acquisition data,’ (Pandora's Star)

I think it's important to maintain the 「」, because sometimes depending on the situation, they change how the quotation marks look. For example, in flashbacks, I've seen some VNs change to 『』 And I agree that it looks prettier than " ". EDIT: I just noticed he talked about 『』 above, awkward...