Punctuation rules of thumb?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by radius

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

No.

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.

Originally Posted by radius

- on US keyboard, is the key next to the semi-colon an apostrophe, a prime mark or single quote?

On your keyboard is the basic "apostrophe"/"single quote"/"straight quote". Same with the "quotation mark" key.

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".

• '' + "" (Dumb)
• ‘’ + “” (Smart)
  
  • You can see how the smart ones curl while the dumb ones are straight.
    
  • Note: Also called Left or Right Single/Double Quotes.
    

• It's an "example" of Dumb Quotes
• It’s an “example” of Smart Quotes
  
  • Note: In proper typography, the apostrophe is a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE (U+2019) character.

* * *

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:

• Go Get ’Em Tiger or Wait ’til the clock strikes ten.
  
  • When dealing with missing letters—such as colloquially—a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTE is used.
• Rock ’n’ Roll
  
  • Both are RIGHT SINGLE QUOTES.
• “An example of dialogue getting cut—” He balled his fist.
  
  • So often the autocorrect accidentally puts LEFT DOUBLE QUOTE after an EM DASH.

* * *

A PRIME and DOUBLE PRIME are completely different symbols (not on the keyboard).

These are mostly used in Maths.

• ′ + ″ = prime + double prime
  
  • Use: Used in Maths. And things like feet/inches, seconds/arcs.
    
  • Example: In this example, Z equals x′ + y. (x prime)
    
  • Example: This person is 5′6″ tall. (5 feet 6 inches).
    
  • Example: I ran the mile in 7′32″. (7 minutes 32 seconds)
    

In Unicode, these are PRIME (U+2032) and DOUBLE PRIME (U+2033).

Originally Posted by radius

- Rules about quotes inside quotes;

Depends on the language.

But for the most part, there are "Outer Quotes" and 'Inner Quotes'.

• US English uses “” for outer quotes and ‘’ for inner.
• UK English uses ‘’ for outer quotes and “” for inner.

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
- [...]

• “So then he told me, ‘Johnny, you’re a real “hooplehead”. Did you know that?’” (US English)
• ‘So then he told me, “Johnny, you’re a real ‘hooplehead’. Did you know that?”’ (British English)

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.

Originally Posted by radius

assuming conversion to left/right single quotes, do you space between the double quote and single quote? If so, is this a  ?

For more technical discussion, see this 2015 topic where I answered it:

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.)

• “So then he told me, ‘Johnny, you’re an idiot!’ ”
  
  • Thin Space. Typographically correct
• “So then he told me, ‘Johnny, you’re an idiot!’ ”
  
  • No-Break Space. "Maximum compatibility", but too large.
• “So then he told me, ‘Johnny, you’re an idiot!’”
  
  • No Space. Leave it up to the font/device/program to do proper kerning.

Originally Posted by radius

- when using a dash to separate clauses, which size do you use? Do you put spaces on either side?

See the Wikipedia article on Dashes.

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.

• This is an – example – sentence with spaced EN DASH.
  
  • UK English tends towards this, and certain style guides like Associated Press (AP).
• This is an—example—sentence with no spaces.
  
  • US English tends towards, and style guides like Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).
• This is an — example — sentence with spaced EM DASH.

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/

Originally Posted by radius

- how about space after ellipses? Or only space after if it would be the end of a sentence?

This has been discussed to death. Most recently in 2019:

ellipses, with or without spaces?

Plus read all the further linked topics.

I agree with Jellby, spaced periods connected with   is your best bet.

Originally Posted by radius

- When italicizing, do you include the punctuation for a sentence. I assume this doesn't include the enclosing quotes for dialogue?

Completely agree with Jellby.

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.)

• “<i lang="es">Es Señor Guillermo loco?</i>”
• “Es Señor Guillermo loco?”

• “<i lang="es">Si</i>, I do want to eat those <i lang="es">taquitos</i>!”
• “Si, I do want to eat those taquitos!”

It would be ridiculous like this:

• <i lang="es">“Es Señor Guillermo loco?”</i>
• “Es Señor Guillermo loco?”
• <i lang="es">“Si,</i> I do want to eat those <i lang="es">taquitos!”</i>
• “Si, I do want to eat those taquitos!”

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:

• Smith played the title role in <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, and <i>King Lear</i>; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.
• Smith played the title role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.

the old way would have given this in CMOS 14:

• Smith played the title role in <i>Hamlet,</i> <i>Macbeth,</i> and <i>King Lear;</i> after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.
• Smith played the title role in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear; after his final performance, during which many in the audience wept, he announced his retirement.

Originally Posted by radius

- 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?"

This is called Logical Punctuation.

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:

• Type "This example into your terminal." (Wrong)
• Type "This example into your terminal". (Correct)

Originally Posted by radius

- 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?

I agree with what Jellby said, but wanted to add a few more cases.

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:

<p>His relativistic thesis is formulated for only that subclass of moral judgments he calls “inner judgments”, those of the form:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>P ought (ought not) to have done A; or</p>
<p>It was right (wrong) of P to have done A;</p>
</blockquote>

<p class="noindent">where “P” refers to some person and “A” to an action performed by P. [...]</p>

<p>It was later, in his Ultima Verba, that he revealed that</p>

<blockquote>
<p>My final work concerned those principles which had absorbed my life: free trade and peace.... These fundamental ideas were its basis...,¹¹¹</p>
</blockquote>

<p class="noindent">and again in his Théorie de l’évolution:</p>

<blockquote>
<p class="blockquote">We may hope that one day public opinion will be intelligent enough to understand that the existence of society can be guaranteed at a cheaper cost, and powerful enough to liberate the State from the special interests which now fight to control it—not to simplify and lighten its ancient and heavy apparatus, but to complicate and expand it evermore.¹¹²</p>
</blockquote>

<p class="noindent">Gone was the certainty of two decades earlier that the ever-advancing market would inevitably bring to an end all the government intervention which hampered its progress. [...]</p>

It's also very common in Maths, where you have equations:

    In the case of

          y = x + 2

when x=3, y=5. The equation is used to [...]

(There's also a ton of other cases, go looking around in books! )

Originally Posted by Jellby

In English texts, at the beginning of some kind of section or break in the narrative, not just because there's something a non-text element above. Or if it's a "fake" paragraph break (the same paragraph continues from the preceding text).

Yes, this is a very common OCR error I look out for.

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!

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

@Jellby
The … ellipses character is preferred to using separate dots as per ..., no matter if spaced or not.

No. Not the best idea in ebooks.

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.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

All the rules can be summed up as follows:

1) Be consistent
2) Use punctuation to make the meaning of the text clear

Agreed.

Originally Posted by Jellby

I don't understand this... I thought the pattern was:

“First paragraph.

“Second paragraph.

“Last paragraph.”

Exactly. Continuation of long dialogue uses that exact pattern. So it would be the SAME PERSON talking for 3 paragraphs.

Keep using open quotes until that person's dialogue ends.

Originally Posted by hobnail

Be careful about using some characters, and test them on ereaders. In the beginning I was using a thin space around em dashes because it looked too squashed to me without any space. Then on my Kobo I discovered that it displays a little box for thin space, the box being the missing character symbol.

Yep, this is very important.

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".

Originally Posted by hobnail

Speaking of indents, the guy who did the ebooks on the now defunct University Adelaide ebook page had a clever hack for automating it with CSS:

[...]

But I'm not sure it's a viable setup; it doesn't indent any paragraph that follows a div, blockquote, figure, img, etc. which looks odd to me.

I just KISS, and manually mark paragraphs as no indent if needed:

<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>

And as you've mentioned, using more complicated selectors has the potential to lead to a lot of edge cases. Depending on how complicated your CSS is, many devices may also not have support (CSS3's ::first-line, etc. etc.).

Originally Posted by DNSB

My personal preference is that the first paragraph after a scene break is also not indented. And that gets a bit messy since some scene breaks use a graphic while others use almost anything from a simple blank line to a header.

While in Print, a scenebreak with a simple gap + no-indent might work... but in ebooks, this would be a very poor decision (because you have no control over when pages break).

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/

[Turtle91]

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...

[radius]

Wow, I wasn't expecting such a detailed list of thoughts on punctuation. Thanks all!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by radius

Wow, I wasn't expecting such a detailed list of thoughts on punctuation. Thanks all!

It's the ideal forum topic. Trivia about which everyone has an opinion, and where there are no absolutes.

[Turtle91]

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!!

[JSWolf]

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.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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.

The fun with UK quotes compared to US quotes is not simply the use of single quotes but rather the use of single quotes for the primary quotes and double quotes for the secondary quotes.

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.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

<snip>
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.

I'd like a plugin that did the reverse, to my eyes US usage of double quotes adds a lot of distracting ‘clutter’ -- along with superfluous attribution tags used by many contemporary writers.

BR

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The fun with UK quotes compared to US quotes is not simply the use of single quotes but rather the use of single quotes for the primary quotes and double quotes for the secondary quotes.

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.

Mind posting your steps please? Thanks.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I'd like a plugin that did the reverse, to my eyes US usage of double quotes adds a lot of distracting ‘clutter’ -- along with superfluous attribution tags used by many contemporary writers.

BR

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.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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.

I guess I've read enough British and/or Australian authors that either way is good to me. But, could you imagine trying to read with double angle quotes?!?!

John said, «I'm going to mess with your mind now...»

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I guess I've read enough British and/or Australian authors that either way is good to me. But, could you imagine trying to read with double angle quotes?!?!

John said, «I'm going to mess with your mind now...»

I don't see the problem, looks nice. It's worse in »German«, or in »Swedish»

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.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I don't see the problem, looks nice. It's worse in »German«, or in »Swedish»

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.

And when the book also has em-dashes that are actually being used as em-dashes and not as quotes?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mind posting your steps please? Thanks.

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:

<p>John said ~%%~I asked Bill and he said ~%~%You should be ashamed of yourself.%~%~ %~~%</p>

I do check first to make sure that someone has not used one of those strings but so far, that has not happened. I also use a cleanup search for a double curly quote between two letters which gets replaced by a right single curly quote if needed. Given that you should never see a curly quote in the code segment, this pretty much covers my needs. These are part of my saved searches.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And when the book also has em-dashes that are actually being used as em-dashes and not as quotes?

Just use them. In running text there's no confusion, because quote dashes always start on a new paragraph. If an em-dash-enclosed remark occurs inside a line of dialogue (either in what a character says or in the narrator's words), use something else, like parentheses or commas. Forgive the silly example:

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.