What's with all the straight quotes (inch marks)?

[KNotTed]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But can it tell when the quotes need to be straight for the HTML code?

It appears from reading the site that it at least partially parses the HTML, so it should leave tag attributes alone.

[WillAdams]

It's impossible to have a script correctly convert uni-directional quotes to directional ones --- it'll never know when to insert apostrophes 'struth, nor will it know when to insert primes &c. --- that's why TEI has explicit markup for beginning and ending quotes, so that nested quotes can be properly handled.

William

[Elfwreck]

When I read .pdb on a Clie, I replaced curly quotes with straight quotes; the curly ones were distracting on a 320 pixel screen. I'm also used to reading a lot of blog/journal entries online, which has almost entirely straight quotes, and fanfic, which should have mostly straight quotes, both because screen resolution can make curly quotes distracting, and some browsers don't display them right and they show up as little question marks instead of quotes. (I gather this is some kind of weird IE compatibility issue. Don't care; am much happier with straight quotes in browser-viewed text.)

I'm just getting to like curly quotes in ebooks, rather than seeing them as a distraction. I use Word, and its autoconvert features, which then need touchup for the exceptions ('Tis '70s 'em —"whatever).

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

However http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/li/liga...ypography).htm
agrees with the definition in wikipedia.

Was that meant to be a response to me? I wasn't taking sides on the issue.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

... and some browsers don't display them right and they show up as little question marks instead of quotes. (I gather this is some kind of weird IE compatibility issue. Don't care; am much happier with straight quotes in browser-viewed text.)...

As much as it would make me happy to blame all the world's ills on IE, this is probably a result of the pages being served with the wrong character encoding. The fault is really on the end of whoever made the website, or their webserver, but you can override it in your browser's settings. I can't remember exactly where in the menus this is for IE. (In Firefox, go to View > Character Encoding...) Trying playing around with the choices: Western (ISO 8859-1) and Unicode (UTF-8) are good things to try.

I always prefer curly quotes. In fact, there are certain fonts I avoid, even ones I really like otherwise (Palatino, KP Fonts), because the supposedly curly quotes aren't curly enough and easy to distinguish. But perhaps this is because I spend more time reading print books (or scans thereof) than material online, and it's easy to get distracted by what you're not used to.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by frabjous

I always prefer curly quotes. In fact, there are certain fonts I avoid, even ones I really like otherwise (Palatino, KP Fonts), because the supposedly curly quotes aren't curly enough and easy to distinguish. But perhaps this is because I spend more time reading print books (or scans thereof) than material online, and it's easy to get distracted by what you're not used to.

This, I think, is a big part of the issue.

Curly quotes are definitely easier to read & understand in print, and things like e-ink that mimic print closely. They're not easier for everyone on a small screen; in a 320x320 PDA screen, curly quotes are twice as wide as straight quotes, and that's *valuable screen real estate* I don't want wasted on punctuation.

Then I got used to flat quotes. I knew the coding issue online had workarounds, but it was a rare problem, because most upload programs didn't acknowledge curly quotes unless the author specifically coded them in. (Today, there are a lot more wysiwyg interfaces, and I see curly quotes on text that was formatted in word and then pasted into a web box.)

I like curly quotes in ebooks--but I'd almost rather a whole book of straight quotes, than more than a couple of instances of curly quotes going the wrong direction. And if I'm not going to take the time to edit carefully, I'll generally leave them as straight when I convert for offline reading.

[DGReader]

Nowadays I use tools that do the HTML and CSS for me, such as my WordPress-powered blog, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc. But when I hand-code, I first write what I want to say in BBEdit selecting "Use Typographer's Quotes" in the document editing preferences. Then I would uncheck that, select blocks of text, and turn them into headings, paragraphs, block quotes, etc. I would assume I could do the same if I wanted to hand-code (or partially hand-code) a book destined for ePub format, couldn't I? Or I could strip the text out of an ePub book, "educate" the quotes, and then drop it into an ePub generator such as Calibre? I'm just guessing since ePub is very new to me.

P.S. I use the UTF-8 Unicode character set and declare it thus when writing HTML, so the curly quotes and all sorts of other typographical things are not a problem to enter directly using my keyboard rather than escape characters and things like

&emdash;