Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> > My thinking was that they were strictly stylistic, and not something
> > you'd ever want in plain text.
> 
> My thinking is that they are perfectly proper English characters on
> their own right and that the world of electronic publishing will become
> much nicer and simpler once we have them everywhere in plaintext and on
> keyboards.

I can probably agree with you as far as quotation marks and different
kinds of '-' are concerned, but the list you mentioned earlier
included things like "superscript 3", which might mean slithering over
the edge of a slippery slope. What about all the world's currency
symbols, musical symbols, astrological symbols, logical operators and
quantifiers, QED sign, Greek letters used in mathematics and physics,
etc? Every good typesetter needs them, but perhaps we don't need them
on the keyboard.

But here's one that should go in rather near the top of the list:
decimal point. Definitely not the same as full stop. Despite the evil
influence of computers, I think most people still distinguish them in
handwriting.

And I'm not so sure about non-breaking space. It's a typesetting hint
rather than a character. You could also have different space
characters for inter-word and inter-sentence space ...

Edmund
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