typography of the apostrophe

[Damian Cugley]

> Disco?  What about "rock 'n roll"?


Worse—it should have two apostrophes, as in 'rock 'n' roll' ('rock 'n'
roll'). Almost any quotation guessification system is going to have
trouble getting that right.

Trying to generate correct quotation marks mechanically is always
going to be a lot of trouble. It is a little bit crazy that computer
keyboards still have weird symbols like § ± ` ~ on them but not the
marks of quotation. I have seen keyboards with keys for ‘ and
’ (turned comma and apostrophe), but these were a specialized
typesetting system. French keyboards do not match QUERTY keyboards, so
it seems crazy to me that they don't have dedicated « and » keys.

The convention used in TeX and Unix of letting ` stand in for an
opening  quotation mark had a certain amount to be said for it, and if
the standards committees had spent less time castigating people for
conflating U+0060 and U+2018 and instead ratified a variant of ISO
8859-1 that substituted U+2018 and U+2019 in positions 0x60 and 0x27
then the world would be a better place. They could add œ and Œ
ligatures while they were at it, so that it would be possible to use
this charset to write French, a language strangely undersupported by
ISO.

Anyway, none of the above is germaine to Smartypants. My
recommendation--for what it's worth--is that Smartypants should stick
to the fairly simple and comprehensible system it is at present.  The
exceptions are rare enough that leaving autors to write ‘n' on
occasion should be acceptable Trying to add language-specific
cleverness is openning a can of worms; see the attempts to get HTML
4's rash promises of language-sensitive quotation marks in Mozilla for
an example <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16206>

--
Damian Cugley, Alleged Literature
http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/