typography of the apostrophe

[John Gruber]

Brian Forte <bforte at adelaide.on.net> wrote on 10/19/05 at 10:48 AM:


> >>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.

> 

> Except in standard Commonwealth typography the single open quote is 

> common as muck.


It struck me as well that this fellow seemed to recognize that this
would only apply to "standard U.S. typography", but thought the
software should change as such anyway.

And I'd even argue with *that* point. I think there are more cases
where single open quotes are used in the U.S. than there are cases
where an apostrophe is used at the start of a word it indicate
elision.

Some of the common cases like 'tis and 'em could be handled by a
hard-coded list of special cases (which could be localized for other
languages). SmartyPants doesn't do this, but it could. Joe Clark
told me that Matt Mullenweg's quote smartener (built into
WordPress?) has such a list of English terms.

The decades thing is another issue. It's probably the case that
something that matches:

    '\d\d\b

e.g.:

    '86
    '73

is more likely to be an elided decade than the start of a
single-quoted string. I.e. I suspect SmartyPants would curl fewer
apostrophes the wrong way if it started looking for this pattern and
assuming they were years. You'd then get mistakes with something
like this:

    '99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall'

The advantage to the current implementation, however, is that
SmartyPants always does the right thing if you avoid this style of
year abbreviation. Just write out the 4-digit year and SmartyPants
will do the right thing.

The people who use this two-year style for years the most are,
typically, in my experience, in higher education. Alumni magazines
use this style to say what year so-and-so gradudated, because
otherwise spelling out the 4-digit year would take up a measurable
amount of space and might seem unnecessary.

SmartyPants is already capable of doing the right thing with 

    the '80s

because the digit-digit-s is a dead giveaway as to the writer's
intent.



> I'd be a touch peeved if Markdown's algorithms were changed to 

> convenience US typographic habit at the expense of mine (and many 

> others).


I wouldn't worry if I were you.

-J.G.