typography of the apostrophe

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> [2005-10-19 15:35]:

> In French we quote text « this way » and sometime we use

> English-style double quotes. Are you suggesting SmartyPants

> should replace “double quotes” with « angle quotes » inside

> French text? The French version of Microsoft Word does this

> and I always hated it. It’s a pain when you want mix

> languages. Not only that, but English-style double quotes are

> often used for inner quotations in French, pretty hard to do

> with Word.


Ah, hmm.

In German, there are two interchangable rules: they’re either

    „bottom and left doublequotes“

which is problematic, because in many fonts the left doublequote
is angled in a way that it only looks right as an English opening
double quote. See Verdana for an example.

Or, the other option:

    »angle marks, but opposite to the French style«

(and no spaces either), and if you want to nest quotations, you
use

    ›single angle marks for the inner ones‹

This is preferred on the web, due to the aforementioned problem
with doublequotes in many fonts. (Whereas in print, using
doublequotes is customary, since the typesetter has complete
control over which font is used.)

In any case, English-style top-doublequotes are never used, so
in German mode, SmartyPants *should* translate straight
doublequotes to angle marks for German text, as opposed to French
mode.


> If SmartyPants was to do something good for the French

> language, I think it could replace <<this approximation of

> french quotes>> with «something better». (I saw that in the

> comments on my weblog just yesterday. People write this when

> they don’t know how to type the right characters.)


And likewise for >>this ASCII transliteration<<. That might be a
good idea regardless of mode.

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