From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jun 09 2006 - 08:50:02 CDT
I do agree that the case of the mirrored apostrophe is effectively a bad glyph in many fonts, and that could bring people into creating documents using the wrong character. This is different from double quotation marks that have no problem.
Anyway, the documents can be corrected so that it will look good with whatever font is used for display.
But another common problem is that the necessary mirrored apostrophe is often missing in fonts, and the fallback display it wrong.
So, let's just hope that the fonts will be updated to include the missing character (no fallback used), and that the few fonts that use incorrect orientation of the mirrored apostrophe will be corrected.
But one of the good things to do is to set the correct "alternate" quotation marks (single quotes, preferably 6-shaped/9-shaped) for German and Polish in the CLDR, so that people will know which character to use.
Note that the default font for the text on the web in legacy HTML was a serif font (note that there's no problem in Times and Times New Roman, although many people prefer reading pages with Verdana which was designed for better readibility on the screen). The problem comes with Verdana which was made for the web but with a missing or incorrect glyph only for this *single* quotation mark.
But may be this font (that is part of the Internet Explorer distribution, and in Windows XP) will be corrected in the final release of IE7 (or may be in an update of IE6 for Windows 98 users, but I read that Microsoft no longer wanted to support it, except for critical security issues that could affect lots of remaining Windows 98 hosts connected to the Internet, and that could still be an issue for all users of the web in general, so I doubt there will be an update of IE6 for Windows 98 including such font package).
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Prilop" <nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 1:40 PM
Subject: Re: Glyphs for German quotation marks
>
> http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/quotes.gif
>
> shows what happens when a typeface has wrong glyphs.
> The (single) closing quote for German is the same as the
> opening quote for English, namely a *rotated* apostrophe,
> which is U+2018.
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf
>
> The *mirrored* apostrophe U+201B is acceptable (though
> not preferred) for English. It is impossible for German.
> Therefore, U+201B is not used for German.
>
> A problem arises when a typeface (e.g. Courier New, Tahoma,
> Verdana) has a *mirrored* apostrophe in U+2018. You write
> a German text with normal quotes U+201A and U+2018 and
> typeface, e.g. Times. Everything is fine. However, when
> the typeface is changed to Verdana (on the reader's system
> on the WWW, for example) the quotes are wrong.
>
>
> See also
> http://www.heckmeck.de/computerstuff/anfzeichen/
> http://webdesign.crissov.de/Typografie/Zitieren#lieberandersrum
>
>
>
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