On 11/19/07, Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
U2019 is the correct apostrophe for English and all European languages, not just French. We use it on the English Wiktionary but it has met with great resistance on the English Wikipedia. The straight apostrophe was invented with the typewriter and dominates the computer and Internet world due to the legacy of ASCII.
I've been thinking about whether a new parser could handle all apostrophe issues at once, including converting '' to italic, ''' to bold, and ' to the correct curved apostrophe, opening or closing or closing single quote mark, and possibly even handle the case of Napolitan.
Interesting, I was midway through asking for more information then realised Wikipedia of course has a good article on the apostrophe :) (see the #Unicode section in particular)
So the main three are: U+0027: "typewriter apstrophe", the one on US keyboards. I notice that in the DOS font (or Windows command shell), it's actually curved. U+2019: "typographic apostrophe", on French keyboards? This one is always curved to the left (like a 9). According to [[Quotation mark glyphs]] this is also the correct symbol for right single quote. U+2018: left single quote (curved like a 6). Not to be confused with the dubious backquote (`)
To render single quotation marks correctly, we could (tongue in cheek) introduce a new syntactic operator, ' as follows:
'foo' -> ‘foo’ ''foo'' -> <i>foo</i> '''foo''' -> <b>foo</b> or <i>‘foo’</i> ''''foo'''' -> <b>‘foo’</b> ''''foo''' -> ’<b>foo</b> F''''oo''' -> F’<b>oo</b>
Oh joy...
It would be kind of nice to be able to have proper quotes, but can anyone think of a good mechanism for doing so?
Steve