On 12/15/11 2:34 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
Not particularly relevant. The "full stop" or "period" that ends a sentence is
semantically different from the "decimal point" that punctuates numbers. That doesn't mean we have
separate character codes for them. From a character-encoding point of view, they're the same character; they
just happen to have multiple uses.
JK
Just now I'm holding a book printed London 1960: like most English books
printed at the time it uses single curly quotes for quotations. But also
like most older printed books (at least back to the eighteenth century),
the *spacing* of quotation marks and apostrophes is quite different, the
closing quotation mark having a much wider left sidebearing than the
apostrophe when it follows an alphabetic character (there's less space
when it follows a mark of punctuation).
You don't often find this kind of spacing in contemporary books, but
it's hard even to have the option to do this kind of old-fashioned
typography when the apostophe and the closing quotation mark are the
same glyph. We'd have to kern each instance manually.
That said, it's pretty clear that we're stuck with what the Unicode
Consortium has decreed for us.
Peter Baker
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