Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
I have been following this with (somewhat bemused) interest. At first I didn't see the point of what you're trying to do--that you were searching for the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. So I looked at the Chicago Manual of Style for enlightenment and found that, as expected, it didn't address the situation at all. But when I look closer, I see that there is indeed a sliver of space between doubled quotation marks, and these are not duplicated in my (ancient, to be sure) version of Word. I'm at 10.25-26 in the 14th edition.
The CSM gives this example, of a quote within a quote within a quote: “I eat what I see.”’” But on the printed page, there is a discernible (though just discernible) space between the single quote and the enclosing double quotes.
Later: Interestingly, after hitting Post, I can see the barest sliver between those sets of quotes. It's more than I see in Word (or pasted into this window) but still less than what I see in the CSM.
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Spacing between letters is kerning.
Traditionally, this was the domain of the printer and font cutter. Certainly not the editor or writer, which is who the Chicago Manual is written for. They left that to those with inky fingers. It was a craft, not something codified in a manual.
These digital days the "typesetter" is often quite unaware of the typographic techniques and conventions that evolved over the centuries. And the first decades of digital type had very little input from typographers. And so we see straight quotemarks on book covers, slanted type masquerading as italic, and any number of other typographic faux pas on a daily basis. The tools to create fine typography are there in all the layout software, but are often ignored or misused.
The authoritative work in this field is
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
I can't find him pronouncing on the issue explicitly, but in his discussion of quotation marks he uses the illustration below, and there isn't a comma in that book he didn't personally approve. The space between the marks is clear.
I primarily work in print publishing, and long ago took an interest in fonts and was soon adjusting and adding kerns to the ones I used. When I noticed a spacing problem I would try to fix it by adjusting the font kerning table, then it would be automatically fixed every time that combination of characters came up. While with ebooks I've had to abandon a lot of the niceties I would apply to print, when possible I try to apply the same principles. And the mashing together of quotation marks is something that makes me wince in any medium.
In an ebook I generally leave the body text as the default, so each user can choose what suits his device. So I can't kern the fonts, even if it was supported by all the ebook readers.
After all the suggestions and info by others and my own experimentation, I found that my original solution, thinsp, works in most cases in epubs. But not readers using Qt4. Older versions of Calibre and Sigil in particular
<p>“ ‘Honeymoon
Letter-spacing, like :
<span style="letter-spacing:.166em">“</span>‘Honeymoon
works in Sigil and Calibre, but not in FBreader. And apparently is not officially supported in epub2.
Margins work in most cases too, but not in FBreader (which is a bit deficient in support for margin styles).
<p>“<span style="margin-left:0.166em">‘</span>Honeymoon
or
<p><span style="margin-right:0.166em">“</span>‘Honeymoon
I had the bright idea I could create a pseudo space character by :
<p>“<span style="margin-left:0.166em"/>‘Honeymoon
This works in Sigil, Calibre and Firefox, but not FBreader. And Sigil's "pretty print" clean on save would just delete it, apparently deciding it was a NOP. Not a good sign it would be left alone or honoured by other software.
I did find one method that works universally to create arbitrary spacing, by scaling a nbsp:
<p>“<span style="font-size:0.6em"> </span>‘Honeymoon
The 0.6 factor gives a result close to thinsp.
So, I'll recall that if I need to do some odd spacing in the future, But for the original quotes, I'll revert to thinsp, as it turns out that the only problem is with the program (Calibre) I was using to preview it, not the other apps and readers.
It was educational, even if I ended up back where I started.