On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > Excuse me? Typography as we know it today exists since Gutenberg; > even the history of commercial font foundries goes back a century > before the typewriter. Further, a lot of the rules of this > relatively new form of typograhpy borrow from prior conventions > established when copying manuscripts was laborious manual work. > And the choice and placement of quotes is a grammatic rule. > > Half a millenium of prior art and craft was pragmatically > sacrified to the limitations of constructing a mechanical device.
There have been huge changes in typography over that half of a millenium. The existence of a history in no way implies that that history was consistent, and if typogrophy itself is anything like punctuation (which seems likely) there have probably been drastic changes every generation or so. While it's downright difficult to find "authoritative" sources, here's what I could come up with: According to Lynne Truss's delightful 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves', the apostrophe was introduced into English in the 16th century, which puts it at a minimum of 50 years past Gutenberg. She has nothing that I can find to say about the typography of said character, but considering how drastically the usage of the apostrophe has changed (from elided letters to possessives and back again) I would be surprised if there were a universal, consistent history of its typography. I can't seem to find much of anything online about it, other than pages telling me how important it is that I spend lots of extra effort typing a very specific puncuation mark that, as far as I can tell, provides no benefit. > But a computer does not have those. We can do better now. Well, some of us can. I personally don't think I've ever seen those characters outside of MSWord or something -- I get a heckuva lot of funky blocks in all of my web browsers, and it's already obvious that my mail reader doesn't show them correctly. I'm downright pedantic about some aspects of language, but I can clearly say that typography is not one of them. Notice that I offensively used two hyphens in the middle of a sentence? That's at least as bad as using a straight apostrophe, I assume, but, well, I don't care. And I'm going to continue using three periods to indicate an ellipsis. All because it's more important that I communicate easily and successfully than that I agree with a relatively arbitrary standard of typography, which is such a stupid phrase that I feel dumber writing it. > > and certainly any sort of established standard is painfully > > recent, so specifically using a more annoying form of > > punctuation because of bitterness towards typewriters seems > > unjustifiably cruel to those of us who have to suffer through > > them. > > It's only a problem because of lackluster Unicode support. Which I'm > relying on to begin with because as noted elsewhere, I write mail > in Greek and German as well as English, and sometimes a > combination of several of those within a single mail. I use > curly quotes because writing in Unicode means they're available > to me anyway. > > What I've found, if it's of interest, is that in mail, Unicode is > somewhat hit-and-miss yet; a substantial amount of people who get > my mail have problems, maybe as many as a third. (Also, mailing > list archives are frothing hateful about this.) But it works much > more reliably on the whole than you'd expect. Most GUI mailers, > in particular, work smoothly. I'm quite impressed that you don't mind that up to a third of the recipients of your email, and all archives of your email, are worse off because your adherence to a specific typographic system. > (I suppose that explains why I've had more complaints on this > list than anywhere else, by a *long* shot.) POssibly. But it's also on-topic on this list. :) > On the web, OTOH, support is solid. If the publishing setup (at > least the webserver, if it's just static files) at a site is > configured correctly, all browsers do the right thing. I haven't had that same luck; or at least, I know that many of my browsers (I bounce around machines and browsers pretty regularly) often display crap instead of an apostrophe. And let me tell you, I would _always_ prefer to see a typewriter apostrophe than crap. -- Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering. --R. Buckminster Fuller --------------------------------------------------------------------- Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
