On 6/16/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Last month, Sabine Cretella was having trouble with double apostrophes in page and category titles, since they were of course treated as wiki markup for italicizing. A workaround of using '' was suggested and seems to work. Platonides suggested using Unicode single quotes (U+2019) instead of apostrophes, and I meant to suggest using Unicode apostrophes (U+02BC). Phil Boswell suggested using an invisible "breaker" or "joiner" between the two apostrophes, such as U+200D Zero-width Joiner.
Allow me to correct some terminology: U+2019 is not the "Unicode single quote", It is "right single quotation mark" U+02BC is not the "Unicode apostrophe". It is "modifier letter apostrophe".
A "modifier letter" is very specifically not a punctuation mark. It is a letter and is marked as such in the Unicode database. For instance if you double-click on a word, this character should always be treated as part of the word. It is an exotic letter used for example in the Hawaiian language. Unicode specifically says "U+2019 is the preferred character for a punctuation apostrophe".
This is a basic misunderstanding which I see repeatedly so it's obviously poorly understood, even by technical people.
And there's at least one more possibility: today I happened to notice that there's also a Unicode double apostrophe character, U+02EE. I'm not sure, but it might be tailor-made for Neopolitan.
Again, there are multiple Unicode double apostrophe characters, but this one is also not punctuation but a letter: "modifier letter double apostrophe".
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
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