MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How to normalize smart quotes and apostrophes for Kindle?

Quoth · 12-06-2022, 05:18 PM

It is the lack of a UTF-8
No need for HTML entities. “and” with ‘and’ are all fine with epub to KDP. The " and ' are only for typewriters and programming. Feet is ′ and inches are ″ (prime and double prime and work on Amazon). The ' might be used in some transliterations of some languages, maybe Farsi or Arabic. The ` on keyboards is only meant as a dead key for words like Sìde (Scottish) or some continental words, it’s not an opening quote. MS Word and LO Writer sometimes use an opening quote instead of an apostrophe, you need to explicitly type ’90s and not expect correct smart conversion of '90.

Blame IBM for basically using a 1928 teletype keyboard design based on Victorian typewriter for all the issues of quotes and apostrophes and primes and blame earlier USA (not IBM as they used EBCDIC) for wasting lots of the 126 characters on control functions instead of fewer and Escape for rest. Even 255 characters was still not used by email in 21st C.

12-06-2022, 05:18 PM	#3
Quoth Still reading Posts: 14,235 Karma: 105299897 Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: Ireland Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper	It is the lack of a UTF-8 No need for HTML entities. “and” with ‘and’ are all fine with epub to KDP. The " and ' are only for typewriters and programming. Feet is ′ and inches are ″ (prime and double prime and work on Amazon). The ' might be used in some transliterations of some languages, maybe Farsi or Arabic. The ` on keyboards is only meant as a dead key for words like Sìde (Scottish) or some continental words, it’s not an opening quote. MS Word and LO Writer sometimes use an opening quote instead of an apostrophe, you need to explicitly type ’90s and not expect correct smart conversion of '90. Blame IBM for basically using a 1928 teletype keyboard design based on Victorian typewriter for all the issues of quotes and apostrophes and primes and blame earlier USA (not IBM as they used EBCDIC) for wasting lots of the 126 characters on control functions instead of fewer and Escape for rest. Even 255 characters was still not used by email in 21st C. Last edited by Quoth; 12-06-2022 at 05:35 PM.