From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sat Feb 03 2007 - 02:06:35 CST
On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Also I would suggest replacing every vertical apostrophe-quote by an
> oblique apostrophe (high comma, which should show as a wedge glyph in
> sans-serif fonts, or as a 9-shaped glyph in serif fonts),
I think you mean that U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("Ascii apostrophe") should be
replaced by U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ("typographer's
apostrophe"). Yes, it should. U+0027 is not a correct apostrophe in any
human language that I heard of, though some rumors say that in Danish, it
is an officially accepted alternative to U+2019 - but I think that if some
officials decided so, they didn't really understand the issue.
The glyph for U+2019 is curved (curly) in a long typographic tradition.
_Some_ sans-serif fonts, such as Verdana and Tahoma, have an oblique wedge
glyph (often greatly resembling PRIME), but that's poor typographic
design, and many sans-serif fonts like Arial and Lucida Sans have an
adequate curved glyph. This is strong enough reason to avoid Verdana and
Tahoma in many contexts.
So I would definitely not call U+2019 "oblique".
The applicable CSS style sheet,
http://www.unicode.org/webscripts/standard_styles.css
contains the following list of suggested fonts:
Arial, Geneva, sans-serif
Both Arial and Geneva have a curved glyph for U+2019. The generic font
name sans-serif could of course refer to anything, but I would expect it
to denote a font with a curved U+2019 almost always.
> This page should be a good example showing the recommanded typography
> and orthography.
Agreed. If Unicode.org pages don't use characters correctly, how could we
expect common people to do so? :-)
Just looking at the list of translations of "What is Unicode?" I see
several characters that look suspiciously like U+0027 APOSTROPHE.
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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