typography of the apostrophe (was Re: Significant whitespace (was Re: Blogging sucks))

[A. Pagaltzis]

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* Patrick Carr <pmc1 at cornell.edu> [2005-10-18 23:40]:

>On Oct 17, 2005, at 9:48 PM, A. Pagaltzis wrote:

>>* Rhesa Rozendaal <rhesa at xs4all.nl> [2005-10-18 02:25]:

>>

>>>If that can handle things like: "Foto's en agenda's"

>>>properly, then it's smarter than Word. That source of hate

>>>turns those apostrophes into single-quotes, as if "s en

>>>agenda" is a paraphrase.

>>>

>>

>>With

>>

>>    Foto's en agenda's

>>

>>it produces

>>

>>    Foto&#8217;s en agenda&#8217;s

>>

>>so it passes that test. In fact, with

>>

>>    'Foto's en agenda's'

>>

>>I get

>>

>>    &#8216;Foto&#8217;s en agenda&#8217;s&#8217;

>>

>>so yeah, it’s smarter than Word.

> 

> This is a huge HUGE hate, stemming from the fact that I'm (a)

> involved with two alumni boards and (b) extremely pedantic.

> With the awesomeness that is Word's smartquote "feature," a

> list of meeting  attendees turns into:

> 

> Steve B. Alum `85

> Alison M. Bee '91

> Jimmy Cerebus `82

> Maude Dechere '63

> etc.

> 

> I'm not that angry that it doesn't know that those are class

> years  and not numbers that might happen to be in quotes,

> because I can see  it being non-trivial to take all cases into

> account.


Yeah. SmartyPants documents it as a known (and unfixable) bug
that *all* of these will turn into opening curly quotes. (Which
is because it does not try to pair up quotes, unlike Word, but
rather uses the context to guess what kind of quote it is, which
is why it almost always guesses right, unlike Word. With this
case being the inevitable exception.)


> However, in standard U.S. typography, the single open quote is

> so rarely used (only quotes within quotes) that that particular

> "smartness" should be off by default. Even at the beginning of

> word, it's still more likely to be an apostrophe signifying

> elision. `Tis a hateful, hateful thing, I tells ya.


Sounds like a fair point.


> On web sites where I have the capability I swap ' with &#8217;

> on the fly because it's pretty and looks better with a

> proportional font. If I were to ever need a single open quote,

> I would input &#8216; by hand.

> 

> Now that I think about it, one could consider extending the

> hate to  proportional typefaces even having a straight quote

> mark glyph. If only browsers had been built around latex.


Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>