Markus,
1. this is one of the reasons for <Q>text</Q> in HTML. The processor can
substitute the correct character.
In general, any word processor should allow the user to style the text as a
quotation, rather than require him to type typographical characters.
2. The situation for Hyphen-Minus is quite similar.
Jony
At 08:12 18/07/99 -0700, Markus Kuhn wrote:
>Something that has bothered me for some time:
>
>Unicode features three very important characters that can also very
>easily be confused:
>
> U+0027 APOSTROPHE
> U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE
> U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
>
>Unicode 2.1 suggests that U+0027 be visually clearly distinct
>(vertically symmetrical, direction neutral) from U+02BC and U+2019, and
>it also declares U+0027 to be less preferable then the other two forms.
>Current keyboards have only one single key for both apostrophe and
>quotation mark, which is usually associated with U+0027. This follows
>old typewriter practice, but is typographically completely outdated.
>Software such as Microsoft's Word tries to automatically replace U+0027
>with U+2018 and U+2019 on entry. This works sometimes and fails
>sometimes, and I see in books and newspaper articles more and more often
>two different types of apostrophes intermixed within the same text. It
>also seems that while Unicode declares U+02BC to be the recommended
>character that should be used as an apostrophe in words such as "isn't",
>Microsoft has decided to unify U+02BC and U+2019 and provide only one
>single code for both function in CP1252 at position 0x92. In addition,
>European keyboard users who have a separate key for acute and grave
>accent also use these two keys frequently to misrepresent both quotation
>marks and apostrophes, which adds further to the confusion. Old ASCII
>versions encouraged even to use grave accent as a left quotation mark
>and apostrophe as a right quotation mark, which looks nice with some
>fonts and horrible with others (especially those following the
>standards).
>
>Somehow, I feel the entire situation has become rather confusing and
>leaves something to be desired.
>
>Remarks and suggestions:
>
>At first, I must admit that I have to agree with Microsoft that I see
>little reason for not unifying
>
> U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE
> U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
>
>since the two characters although they are semantically distinct are
>graphically indistinguishable in practically all fonts. Keyboard typists
>can hardly be expected to select the right character and automatic
>smart-quote algorithms also cannot be expected to get this distinction
>right reliably. Couldn't Unicode follow Microsoft and just remove the
>recommendation that U+02BC be the recommended apostrophe character and
>instead give U+2019 the dual meaning that it de-facto has already today?
>
>I addition, I feel that the current ISO 8859 oriented national keyboard
>standards are not adequate for modern Unicode-era word processing
>practices, as they put obsolete typewriter characters such as U+0027 on
>too prominent keys, while they have no key positions for the extremely
>frequently needed typesetting characters that are for instance supported
>by CP1252 (directional single and double quotes, en and em dashes,
>etc.). Software either has to use shaky algorithms to make educated
>guesses on which character the user might have meant (such as Word tries
>to do), or sequences of ASCII characters are interpreted with new
>semantics (such as both TeX and Word do), in order to give typists some
>compromise access to these characters.
>
>I think it is urgent time to revise national keyboard standards here. We
>really need standardized ways to easily enter say at least
>
> 2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 2013 EN DASH
> 2014 EM DASH
>
>on keyboards for English language users, and corresponding extensions on
>other national keyboard standards. This might be a good opportunity to
>introduce on US keyboards the Level 2 Select key (AltGr), while on
>European keyboards is is probably sufficient to just add appropriate
>labels to a number of new Level 2 Select positions.
>
>May be, the folks who blessed us a few years ago with the Windows95 keys
>are in a good position to help and start promoting something much more
>useful here, towards finally upgrading keyboard layout standards to the
>needs of the typographic word processing era?
>
>We could have either commonly agreed entry methods for these characters
>(say as a new amendment to ISO 14755), or better even new labeled key
>positions.
>
>Opinions and suggestions?
>
>Markus
>
>--
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
>Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
>
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