MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

radius · 01-22-2020, 10:00 AM

Does anybody have a good set of punctuation rules of thumb? I'm imagining something like Strunk&White for typesetting.

I tinker with turning some text files I have to epubs, and they come with a wide variety of "typographic" conventions since they date from before unicode or HTML entities were common -- lots of things that used to be represented by US keyboard-only punctuation and typesetting by spacing etc.

All the typesetting guides I've been able to find on-line go into insane amounts of detail about leading, and spacing, and how many words per line etc. that are both too in depth and yet not that useful to me.

Things I am thinking of include:

- on US keyboard, is the key next to the semi-colon an apostrophe, a prime mark or single quote? Which glyph should be used for contractions and possessives?
- Rules about quotes inside quotes; assuming conversion to left/right single quotes, do you space between the double quote and single quote? If so, is this a  ?
- when using a dash to separate clauses, which size do you use? Do you put spaces on either side?
- how about space after ellipses? Or only space after if it would be the end of a sentence?
- When italicizing, do you include the punctuation for a sentence. I assume this doesn't include the enclosing quotes for dialogue?
- For quotes that aren't part of dialogue, does the punctuation go on the inside or outside of the quotes? For example, should the question mark be on the inside of this "quote?"
- If you use indented paragraphs, when do you have a non-indented paragraph? I usually do for start of chapters or scene breaks, but how about after an illustration? Or a quote, letter, list etc. of some kind?

01-22-2020, 10:00 AM	#1
radius Lector minore Posts: 660 Karma: 1738720 Join Date: Jan 2008 Device: Aura One, Paperwhite Signature	Punctuation rules of thumb? Does anybody have a good set of punctuation rules of thumb? I'm imagining something like Strunk&White for typesetting. I tinker with turning some text files I have to epubs, and they come with a wide variety of "typographic" conventions since they date from before unicode or HTML entities were common -- lots of things that used to be represented by US keyboard-only punctuation and typesetting by spacing etc. All the typesetting guides I've been able to find on-line go into insane amounts of detail about leading, and spacing, and how many words per line etc. that are both too in depth and yet not that useful to me. Things I am thinking of include: - on US keyboard, is the key next to the semi-colon an apostrophe, a prime mark or single quote? Which glyph should be used for contractions and possessives? - Rules about quotes inside quotes; assuming conversion to left/right single quotes, do you space between the double quote and single quote? If so, is this a  ? - when using a dash to separate clauses, which size do you use? Do you put spaces on either side? - how about space after ellipses? Or only space after if it would be the end of a sentence? - When italicizing, do you include the punctuation for a sentence. I assume this doesn't include the enclosing quotes for dialogue? - For quotes that aren't part of dialogue, does the punctuation go on the inside or outside of the quotes? For example, should the question mark be on the inside of this "quote?" - If you use indented paragraphs, when do you have a non-indented paragraph? I usually do for start of chapters or scene breaks, but how about after an illustration? Or a quote, letter, list etc. of some kind?