[Wikitext-l] French apostrophe

[Steve Bennett]

On 11/19/07, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at 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' -> &lsquo;foo&rsquo;
''foo'' -> <i>foo</i>
'''foo''' -> <b>foo</b> or <i>&lsquo;foo&rsquo;</i>
''''foo'''' -> <b>&lsquo;foo&rsquo;</b>
''''foo''' -> &rsquo;<b>foo</b>
F''''oo''' -> F&rsquo;<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