Dear Laurent,

> I am still wondering about keyboard input in Russia.
>
> Permit me a few more questions about left and right double
> quotes.  I understand that Eglish double quotes are
> essentially the same in usage and glyph form as similar
> Russian ones, so that the French guillemets are rare in
> Russia.  Even in France guillemets are pretty well restricted
> to literary works.
>
> Is this correct?

No. Guillemets are considered the main type of Russian quotes,
    they are usually typed as <<text>> (as ligatures)
    or \<text\> (as commands, more rarely),
    usually additional commands are provided, but they are not that
convenient,

the second type is English-like quotes,
    but they are typed differently from English (American):
    ,,text`` (in latest cyrillization packages these are ligatures giving
the proper quotes)
    (not ``English text''),
    also usually additional commands are provided, but they are not that
convenient.

When the texts with quotes are nested, quotes of different types are used in
turn.

No other quotes (' ` >> << etc) are used.

No additional space (or _very_ small space) is added between the text and
the quotes, unlike French.
Same refers to !?: etc.

> Subsidary question.  I do not see such left and right double
> quotes in the DOS cp866 series, not so far.  What did
> Russians use in DOS days?  The ASCII straight double quotes?
> Or??  Are so called "smartquotes mechanisms" prevalent?

Namely. ASCII strait double quotes were used generally.

\bye
Mikhail Kolodin, mailto:myke@mail.ru, http://myke.da.ru, ICQ#10895085,
2:5030/207.16@FidoNet