On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 01:39:25PM -0500, Maiorana, Jason wrote: > My thinking was that they were strictly stylistic, and not something > youd ever want in plain text. When going through school, quotes where > never taught as having significance in their slant or stroke direction. > > Also, when writing, I invariably write them as strict vertical lines. > Perhaps this is different in the UK?
They aren’t terribly well distinguished in my writing, either. But they are always distinguished in printing, so anything that needs to get printed has to distinguish them. For the most part, I think it better to make the computer accept print–ready input then have it try and guess at what needs to be changed. I guess all caps or lowercase was just too much, but we really don’t need that for email either. > (I was under the impression that > ’ and ` were non-english accent marks or something....) ` is a non–English accent; ‘ and ’ are single quotes. Look in just about any book, and you’ll see that it consistently distinguishes them. > I mean, I can imagine having control over it, so that you could use > them if you really want to. I just didnt think they deserved a whole > key on the keyboard, thats all. Why not type what you mean? > Just like you dont have an "italics shift" key or > a "bold shift". You do, usually; CTRL–I and CTRL–B. Arguablly that’s all most of these characters need, but outside command–line Unix, most of them see more use then several of the characters on the keyboard. >Could you imagine a keyboard with MINUS, HYPHEN, EMDASH, > and > ENDASH keys? If we hadn’t tried to please foreigners when making ASCII, by adding the funny symbols they put on letters, like ` and ^ and ~, we quite possibly would have. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-- A field where a thousand corpses lie. -- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind" -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
