On 11/19/07, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail(a)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