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

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Which is what I thought! I wondered because the person I was replying to stated (") as feet and (') as inches.

Derek

yea and I have seen people reverse the " seconds and ' minutes as well.

Dale

[GlennD]

Way back when I was reading on a Palm III, the reader I was using choked on curly quotes and other formatting characters. I made it a practice when I was converting books to a readable (for me) format to always change them to a ". It was the opposite of laziness - it actually took an extra step to do (not that find/replace is terribly difficult).

TBH, it doesn't make any difference to me which direction a quotation mark is facing. I know I'm "wrong" from a strict formatting perspective, but it doesn't make an ebook the slightest bit less readable to me. I tend to prefer books to be in the lowest common denominator - plain text, so that I'm able to easily convert them to the several formats in use at my house. Horrifying, I know, to the formatting purists.....

[DGReader]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Absolutely incorrect terminology and (mis)usage of characters.

Straight / uni-directional single (apostrophe ') and double quote (") marks are a convention from typewriters where the limited character set forced the directional marks (‘’ and “”) into a single duplexed key --- they have since found usage in computer code as a way to indicate strings and various other conventions:

print "Hello World"

Primes and double primes which are used in mathematics to indicate various things and to indicate feet and inches (5′ 2″), or degrees and seconds of degrees are separate characters (which unfortunately don't appear in many fonts --- Hypatia Sans Pro and Arno Pro are two which come to mind).

Please, use the proper character in the proper context.

William

I stand corrected, thank you. I knew that straight quotes are used in computer languages because I used to hand-code HTML, but the way I learned typography, straight single and double quotes were called "foot marks" and "inch marks." I was taught that it looked just as bad to use curly single and double quotes for notating height (as in your example 5’ 2” in the serif font I'm using) as it looked to use straight single and double quotes for apostrophes, quotations-within-quotations and quotation. But you have taught me something new, and it makes sense. Now I know to notate height thus: 5ʹ 2ʺ.

Forgive me for doubting you, but I searched the Internet to find corroboration for what you said, and I found this helpful web page about common typographical errors. (Although I still don't see the difference between 98.6º and 98.6°. Well, okay, maybe the latter "correct" one looks smaller. Anyway…)

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by DGReader

(Although I still don't see the difference between 98.6º and 98.6°. Well, okay, maybe the latter "correct" one looks smaller. Anyway…)

For whatever it's worth, the degree symbol as shown in your example above is a circle, whereas the O ordinal is more oval in shape. Hard to tell in small point sizes, but in larger sizes:

98.6º and 98.6°

the difference becomes more obvious. The degree symbol should always be a circle, not an oval.

These typographical niceties may sound trivial and totally anal to many (as in, "get a life, dude, and just read the damn book"), but it's all the little trivial things like these that add up to the difference between a professional-looking document and one that is just flogged up on Word. Professionally typeset documents just beg to be read. You've got to really want to read something that looks like unedited OCRd text.

[frabjous]

At first, I didn't know what you all were talking about, thinking to myself -- how could anyone not see the difference between those two superscripts? And the difference isn't shape. But then I remembered that thanks to My custom Mobileread stylesheet for the Stylish plugin for Firefox, I see MobileRead in a different font from everyone else. In the font I'm using, the difference couldn't be clearer. He's my screen cap of cm's latest post:



So obviously this is very font-dependent.

The difference is also very noticeable in the IMPACT font:


98.6º and 98.6°

[omk3]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

These typographical niceties may sound trivial and totally anal to many (as in, "get a life, dude, and just read the damn book"), but it's all the little trivial things like these that add up to the difference between a professional-looking document and one that is just flogged up on Word. Professionally typeset documents just beg to be read. You've got to really want to read something that looks like unedited OCRd text.

I generally can read anything if it is well written enough, and not really think about any of this. Most people don't even realize what kind of quotes there are in the text - but you are right: everyone does realize that a book looks "nicer" and more professional, hence more inviting, when all these little details have been taken care of. And I find it encouraging that there are people who care enough about these things to make an issue of them. In the meantime, the world of commercial ebooks has much more basic problems to deal with than curly quotes: wrong encoding, ocr errors, forgotten headers and page numbers in the middle of the text, typos, you name it. The way things are now, I am happy just to find an ebook without any obvious errors in it - but I look forward to the time when curly quotes and ligatures will be the only things I have to complain about

[DGReader]

frabjous, I love the Century Gothic font. I set up my Safari preferences for this font, but I rarely see Web pages that are coded without font faces, so I rarely get to see it on the Web. But maybe I should consider adding my own style sheet. I used to have one merely to suppress hyperlink underlining, but maybe I should revise it to force my preferred font.

P.S. You are so right about how different the 0 ordinal and the degree mark look in Impact. Thanks for demonstrating that. Now I really get it. Luckily, special characters are easy to key on my Mac. All I have to do is Alt+Shift+8 instead of Alt+0.

[DGReader]

Originally Posted by DGReader

To me it makes a big difference when I see proper slanted or curly quotation marks (‘ ’) and (“ ”) instead of straight inch marks (' ') or foot marks (" ") around quotations.

~and~

Originally Posted by delphidb98

I wondered because the person I was replying to stated (") as feet and (') as inches.

Ugh. I meant to say foot marks (' ') and inch marks (" ") but I did so much cutting and pasting in my post that I mixed them up. I do know what's right, but my editing defeated my purpose. Sorry.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by omk3

I generally can read anything if it is well written enough, and not really think about any of this. Most people don't even realize what kind of quotes there are in the text - but you are right: everyone does realize that a book looks "nicer" and more professional, hence more inviting, when all these little details have been taken care of.

Yep, that's it in a nutshell. Professional typography is unnoticeable in the details, but makes the overall document look so nice that it draws your eye to the next and makes you just want to start reading. Epub has a long way to go to achieve that goal, since to those of us who enjoy the look and feel of a well-typeset book, reading epub is so annoying it ruins the experience.

There is a book that one of our MR members spent a lot of time to put together, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. You can find it in the uploads. It is just about the best that can be done with epub at the moment, and it is certainly well done and more than acceptable to most people reading on an ereader. I found it amusing how many of the people who get on threads like this and say things like "just read the book," or "you need to go back to print, dude," as if good typography doesn't matter in the least to them, were the same people gushing over how good the epub version of Three Men in a Boat looks, what a nice job Zelda did in putting it together so well, etc., so good typography does indeed matter to even the silly people here who try so hard to insist that it doesn't.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by DGReader

P.S. You are so right about how different the 0 ordinal and the degree mark look in Impact. Thanks for demonstrating that. Now I really get it. Luckily, special characters are easy to key on my Mac. All I have to do is Alt+Shift+8 instead of Alt+0.

Note it's not a "0" (zero), but an "o" (oh) in superscript. There's also ª in my keyboard, which is the feminine form (in Spanish) of º, both are underlined or not, depending on the font. The degree symbol ° is a circle with no underline.

[charleski]

Those who want to convert to typographic quotes might be interested in this little program from John Gruber. It's basically a perl script that will act as a plugin for BBEdit, Movable Type and Blosxom and will convert straight quotes to proper ones.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by kennyc

So True! I constantly fight with Word! (and avoid it whenever possible).

Word is the easiest app I know for changing straight quotes to curly quotes.

When I subsequently do a proof reading, I've not encountered any issues with the quotes (so far).

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Presently I take my documents from Word, with smartquotes, paste it into Dreamweaver to have it convert smartquotes to proper HTML code ("“" and "”"), then open that HTML doc in Sigil to create my ePub. This process preserves the curlyquotes in a format that is readable on any properly ePub-compliant reading device or software. It also works for any other characters for which there is a proper HTML coding (M-dashes, for instance). These ePubs test as ePub-compliant, which is what all e-book producers should be shooting for.

I realize there are some reading devices and software that have problems with these characters. But most of these devices or software are not ePub-compliant, and I refuse to create e-book formats to cater to non-compliant devices and software... if we book producers did that, and readers accepted it, there would be no incentive to make all reading devices and software properly compliant.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by charleski

Those who want to convert to typographic quotes might be interested in this little program from John Gruber. It's basically a perl script that will act as a plugin for BBEdit, Movable Type and Blosxom and will convert straight quotes to proper ones.

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

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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

How does a Word Processor with "autocorrect quotes to smart quotes" know which smart quote to insert as you type? It uses context. Is it after a space or at end of a word? What other punctuation is around? I started earlier in the thread what I think rules are, roughly. I don't know how closely this script would be to the rules I stated, and would definitely welcome additions and corrections to the list...

Of course, that does mean that it will occasionally make a mistake, and ought to be checked over.

EDIT: Gaa... realized you were asking a different question, but the poster below has answered it.