At 01:27 AM 8/3/99 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
Note that U+2019, the proper English left
>quotation mark, doesn't look like the old GRAVE ACCENT, so we have to
>use the "phantasy" character U+201b instead, which is probably not
>really used in proper English typography!]
>
I would suggest you refrain from getting people used to yet another shape
of quotation mark. While a character code exists for this glyph, and it is
supported in many fonts, the fact is that after some time, some people will
code Unicode based text with *character* 201B to make it 'look' like the
fallback *glyphs*. Use the left quote as a fallback glyph for those that
want it.
>
>No, please understand that this is *not* only a Unicode related problem!
>This is has been a problem of the X11 fonts for a long time that has
>been a cause of confusion completely independent of Unicode. It is in
>fact a small incompatibility between US-ASCII and Latin-1 caused by the
>addition of ACUTE ACCENT to Latin-1. Unix users have been mislead by the
>design of the X11 fonts for a long time into believing that the way they
>see APOSTROPHE and GRAVE ACCENT will look comparable on all available
>output devices. This is most certainly not the case! Users on other
>platforms who write feet and inches as 6'3" currently get a funny
>looking result on X11 screens.
Not only that, but for languages other than English quotation marks point
the other other way. Using a neutral glyph for a limited typewriter type
repertoire that matches the neutral glyph for " allows all languages the
same degree of fallback rendering and makes syntax quotes language
independent.
A./
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