From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Sat Feb 03 2007 - 13:37:39 CST
On 3 Feb 2007, at 17:52, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> Aren't you lead stray by the poor renderings usually given to U+0027?
>> As it is semantically an apostrophe, it should be used when an
>> apostrophe is called for; not U+2019, as it should be used in
>> quotations. But U+0027 should be given, better, apostrophe looking
>> renderings. If this task, getting better fonts, seems hopeless,
>> perhaps a new apostrophe character should be added.
>
> No. U+0027 needs to remain neutral, i.e. vertical, due to its weak
> definition as it is used both for opening and closing quotes, or as
> apostrophes, or as substitutes for various characters or even
> sometimes to replace various diacritics.
>
> The rendering is not wrong in the Unicode page, and not even in the
> fonts used to render it. What is criticized here is the use of the
> weak vertical apostrophe-quote from ASCII ; all typographers for
> French at least recommand using the oriented 9-shaped apostrophe or
> a high-comma. But definitely not the vertical quote from ASCII
> which is just a default substitute to be used in reduced character
> sets (we are on the Unicode website, it should use the Unicode
> repertoire, without being constrainted into the reduced ASCII set,
> because no default substitute is necessary here).
>
> Note that the apostrophe in French is NOT a punctuation; it is
> orthographic, and it has its own linguistic semantic. It's more
> like a modifier letter.
>
See my other post. If U+0027 is a multipurpose character, and the
only alternative is to fake it with U+2019, then probably a new
character should be added: a proper linguistic apostrophe.
Hans Åberg
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