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
