[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But if you don't embed a font or it's an old ereader? What happens if you you use real prime marks?

I wrote in detail about Prime + Double Prime characters just a few months ago:

My response in Diap's "PunctuationSmarten Sigil plugin" thread.

Also see mine + Jellby's thorough discussion on Primes (and various other typographical questions) in:

"Punctuation rules of thumb?"

Some old readers, like my original Nook, had issues with the actual prime characters missing in fonts... but honestly, I currently recommend using the proper primes no matter what (for TTS and Accessibility reasons).

Originally Posted by Jellby

No, we should use the proper characters and blame the reader (the device, not the person) if they don't work.

I agree completely (as usual).

Originally Posted by Quoth

A throw back to typewriters as actually is the underline. IMO real ebooks and paper books should never use the underline except for URLs, they meant "typeset this in italic".

Agreed. The only reason underline was used was because typewriters didn't have italics fonts.

In modern documents/typography, underline should be relegated to URLs only. (And as Jellby said, in Print, no underline needed.)

In the case of books/documents that originally were typeset using underline, but are now digitized/modernized, this is what I've done:

Original:

<p>This is an <u>Example Book Title</u> from a typewriter.</p>

Alternate #1 (preferred)

You digitize what the original author intended to write:

<p>This is an <i>Example Book Title</i> from a typewriter.</p>

Alternate #2

You mark the "original visuals", but override it with modern typography:

<p>This is an <span class="underline">Example Book Title</span> from a typewriter.</p>

span.underline {
	font-style: italic;
}

If for some reason you needed to duplicate the original look, this allows you to easily change to:

span.underline {
	text-decoration: underline;
}

(Another alternate could be <i class="underline"> with a "font-style: normal".)

Side Note: This reminds me of a book I digitized back in 2014. It was written on a typewriter, and the author used bold instead of italics:



Clearly, you can tell the bold text was meant to be italics, and the (50) markup was meant to be footnotes.

Modernizing and retypesetting the book, I updated to this:



The new print/ebook doesn't have an underline in sight.

(The original also had ASCII art diagrams/equations... which I recreated + vectorized.)