01-24-2020, 06:33 PM | #16 | |||||||||||||||
Wizard
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There are a handful of sites, like "Butterick's Practical Typography": https://practicaltypography.com/ but nothing geared towards ebooks specifically. (And I don't agree with some of the stuff said there either.) Complete Side Note: On Grammar, Strunk and White's book is... not good. (There's a ton written about the topic. Just a few months back I came across a fantastic English article critiquing many portions of it. I'll have to find that PDF.) * * * * * Now, onto the questions: For the most part, I agree with everything Jellby says + some additions. I'll try to answer these as in-depth as I can. Quote:
Both of those symbols ' + " are also known as "dumb quotes". They're mostly just there for super easy typing. In proper typography, you would be using "smart quotes" or "curly quotes".
* * * Side Note: In many word processors (Word/LibreOffice), they'll auto-correct and try to substitute in the curly quotes. You can also run your text through "Smarten Punctuation" afterwards. Typographical Note: These will get ~99% proper smart quotes correct, but they get many edge cases wrong, like:
* * * A PRIME and DOUBLE PRIME are completely different symbols (not on the keyboard). These are mostly used in Maths.
In Unicode, these are PRIME (U+2032) and DOUBLE PRIME (U+2033). Depends on the language. But for the most part, there are "Outer Quotes" and 'Inner Quotes'.
Note: For a list of quotation marks in other languages, there's a fantastic table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotat...#Summary_table You pretty much have a combination of everything under the sun. Side Note: For nested quotes within quotes, they follow the alternating pattern: - Outer - Inner - Outer - [...]
but going 3 levels deep is very rare (and usually you want to reformat instead, because it's usually confusing)... and 4 I've never seen. Quote:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...30#post3099330 Typographical Note: Technically, the proper character between an inner+outer quote would be a THIN SPACE (U+2009). ... but support on devices is poor. So go with or no space at all. (I prefer no space and leave it up to the font's kerning.)
Quote:
It's completely a style thing. You can either use the EM DASH — or the EN DASH –. With the EM DASH, you can put spacing or not put spaces.
Typographical Note: SPACE + EM DASH + SPACE is way too large, so the proper typographical space would be a HAIR SPACE or a THIN SPACE on either side. But support for those spaces in ebooks is... poor. And again, I agree with Jellby. Go with no space, and this should be left up to the font's kerning. Ebook-Related Side Note: There are also many other dash-like characters (like the MINUS SIGN). I answered it in-depth on Reddit in 2019: https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/com...important_too/ Quote:
ellipses, with or without spaces? Plus read all the further linked topics. I agree with Jellby, spaced periods connected with is your best bet. Quote:
DO NOT include the punctuation in the italics if it doesn't belong. Remember, the italics has a SEMANTIC meaning. Here's an explanation I wrote in an email back in 2018 (discussing proper markup for "foreign words" in a book): * * * I'm going to step back to the <i> as color and larger font instead (since it's easier to see. PLUS it gets you in the mentality of semantics, NOT presentation.)
It would be ridiculous like this:
In Non-Fiction, I deal with a lot of italicized book titles and things like that, so the semantics are also important there. The reason why CMOS initially italicized those punctuation is because of poorer visuals (in some fonts/programs) or them smashing together (like the ?" colliding like I showed before). (The reason why I initially started to strip all italics on punctuation Before/After... because the OCR false positives were THROUGH THE ROOF.) Then I started to notice this inconsistent application of italics, and you would have these strange edge cases where only ONE of the quotation marks was italic or not (like the Si, [...] taquitos). .... anyway, I was hunting down a few more examples and I guess the rule changed in CMOS 15:
the old way would have given this in CMOS 14:
Quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotat...of_punctuation British tends towards "Logical Punctuation" while US tends towards... not. There's no right answer though. Again, it completely depends on your language, Style Guides, genre conventions, publisher, etc. In technical documentation, Logical Punctuation is the norm, because you have to be very precise. You can't write:
Quote:
In Non-Fiction, it's very common to have blockquotes with continuations afterwards or small comments in-between. Here's two real-life examples from my current project: Spoiler:
It's also very common in Maths, where you have equations: Code:
In the case of y = x + 2 when x=3, y=5. The equation is used to [...] Quote:
If a large paragraph continues from the previous page and gets split, the first word on the next page will be a completely new sentence. The OCR can't tell the difference, so it might think it's an "unindented paragraph" on page 2! Quote:
Please read those ellipses topics above. They go into extreme depth explaining the many cases why that ellispis character is a poorer choice. In my 2017 post, you can also see how different fonts don't render them consistently. In many cases, they will clash with normal periods. Quote:
Quote:
Keep using open quotes until that person's dialogue ends. Quote:
For more on this, and more technical details, see this topic: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...27#post3915427 where I also discuss the "rare spaces". Quote:
Code:
<h2>Chapter 1</h2> <p class="firstline">And so he said:</p> <blockquote> <p class="noindent">This is a very long quotation.</p> <p>And this continues the very long quotation.</p> </blockquote> <p>Blah blah blah, this continues the story.</p> Quote:
So in ebooks, it's best to use something like a graphic/centered-asterisks. Last year, I answered this on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfpublish..._scene_breaks/ Last edited by Tex2002ans; 01-24-2020 at 07:13 PM. |
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01-24-2020, 07:11 PM | #17 |
A Hairy Wizard
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h3 + p, p.SceneBreak + p, div.ChapterDivision + p {text-indent:0; margin-top 2em}
All works fine for me. However, don't forget to check that your target device/app supports this kind of standard styling... |
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01-28-2020, 03:06 PM | #18 |
Lector minore
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Wow, I wasn't expecting such a detailed list of thoughts on punctuation. Thanks all!
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01-29-2020, 03:05 AM | #19 |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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01-29-2020, 06:25 AM | #20 |
A Hairy Wizard
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Just remember - my opinion is the right one...If there was a better one I'd adopt it... and I'd still have the right one!!
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02-10-2020, 02:10 PM | #21 |
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There are a some things I do fix in eBooks relating to punctuation.
I fix anything there are spaces around em-dashes and elipses (...) because they don't look correct with spaces. Also, I replace en-dashes with em-dashed because en-dashes are too easy to get mixed up with a dash. em-dash are larger and they don't get mixed up. Something I don't like is single quotes (used a lot on the UK) instead of double quotes. I do wish there are a plugin to fix this. Last edited by JSWolf; 02-10-2020 at 02:13 PM. |
02-10-2020, 06:27 PM | #22 | |
Bibliophagist
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Quote:
John said ‘I asked Bill and he said “You should be ashamed of yourself.” ’ vs. John said “I asked Bill and he said ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ” Personally, the few times I've bothered to convert, I've used a multi-step process to search and replace. The steps are saved for the next time I might need them. |
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02-10-2020, 06:43 PM | #23 | |
null operator (he/him)
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Quote:
BR |
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02-10-2020, 07:17 PM | #24 | |
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Quote:
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02-10-2020, 07:18 PM | #25 |
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I guess it depends what you grew up with. But to my eyes, single quotes as the main quotes just looks wrong. The attribution tags don't bother me. They are easy to ignore.
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02-10-2020, 08:52 PM | #26 | |
A Hairy Wizard
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Quote:
John said, «I'm going to mess with your mind now...» |
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02-11-2020, 12:54 PM | #27 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Quote:
Personally, I prefer em-dashes (or quotation dashes) and no quotes: —I'm going to mess with your mind now —said John—. Yes, I am... but I'm biased. |
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02-11-2020, 04:23 PM | #28 |
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And when the book also has em-dashes that are actually being used as em-dashes and not as quotes?
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02-11-2020, 06:01 PM | #29 |
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It's a pretty simplistic solution. First I convert the 4 flavours of curly quotes into strings of ~ and % and then convert those back into curly quotes.
“ => ~%~% => ‘ ” => %~%~ => ’ ‘ => ~%%~ => “ ’ => %~~% => ” So the sentence I used in my sample comes out looking like after the first pass: Code:
<p>John said ~%%~I asked Bill and he said ~%~%You should be ashamed of yourself.%~%~ %~~%</p> Last edited by DNSB; 02-11-2020 at 06:06 PM. Reason: Added sample sentence from previous post |
02-12-2020, 01:17 PM | #30 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Quote:
He stopped the car —or whatever it was— and said: —When are you coming back? I mean —he added—, if you are coming back. —Why do you, or anyone else, care? —replied she with a smirk (at least that's what it seemed to me). Note: I'm not advocating for this use in English, I'm just saying that I like this form, mostly because it's the standard form in my mother tongue. |
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