Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 05/18/07 16:43

Scripsit thogra:

> I have something like this: "This is a quote"

But what's the _exact_ thing you have? URL?

> Now I want the quotation marks to be a little larger:

Why? In any decent font, quotation marks have been designed to match the
design of letters, and in indecent fonts, their _shape_ is wrong anyway.
Thus, select a suitable list of _fonts_, if you are worried about quotation
mark appearance. For example, don't use Verdana.

> <span class="quote>&bdquo;</span>This is a quote<span
> class="quote>&rdquo;</span>

Which quotes are you actually using? Surely not English-style quotes. And
not really German-style either. Even Duden's pages use wrong characters, but
the correct closing quotation mark for German is &ldquo; and not &rdquo;
(note that the _names_ of the characters are misleading and reflect English
usage). This is relevant, since different quotes have different line
breaking behavior.

> My problem is now that the last quotation mark sometimes gets a
> linebreak making it standing alone on the next line which - of course
> - looks ugly.

Please post a URL and specify the browser(s) tested.

> Can I somehow glue it to the last word in the sentence ?

If you are really using &rdquo; as a closing quote, you should not have
problems with line breaks. But if you actually use &ldquo;, as you might
need in several languages, then you can use

&bdquo;This is a <nobr>quote&ldquo;</nobr><wbr>

The <wbr> allows an immediate line break after &ldquo;, and this might be
useful, since some browsers don't break there automatically (since they
assume, so to say, that everyone uses &ldquo; as an _opening_ quotation
mark). Specifically, if the closing quotation mark is followed by a space
and an opening parenthesis "(" or "[", IE will not divide the text into
lines so that the parenthetic expression starts on a new line.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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