Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to Curly quotes

typography notes and the curly quote mystery

For those of higher typographic sensibilities who may have been offended by my incorrect identification of (") as a quote mark and (') as an apostrophe, this web page may help set the record straight.

Briefly, " and ' are more properly known as a tick-marks, hash-marks, or - in the case of the former ("), a ditto.

True typographic quotes - double (“”) and single(‘’) along with other special characters like (©™®°) are available on the expanded ascii chart for Windows. Normally, such characters may be included in your text either by direct entry from the keypad with an alt+nnnn keystroke combination (alt+0147 for “, for ex.), or by copying from the Windows character map to the clipboard, and subsequently pasting into your text.

It is my experience that the HZ input window will not accept the alt+nnnn keystroke sequences, and will close the input window and kick you back to a previous browser window, at least on my machine.

There are a number of webpages which go into some detail about the problems with curly quotes, and based on what I've read, my current working assumption is that the copy I pasted into the post under discussion may have been composed in one of the problem text editors, although that still does not explain why I don't see the odd characters.

Again, viewing the HZ source for my post, Hitler's becomes Hitler’s.

Fox didn't specify, but I'm assuming this is the problem.

S

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