3 ms·
I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was customary to
by mkehrt 11y ago
I have heard the claim that this style dates to the introduction of typewriters, which required an ordering of the characters. Beforehand, it was customary to print the quotation marks over the period,which can be done on a printing press.
- braythwayt 11y agoI am not a graphic designer, but I did work in the publishing business earlier in my career, and this is exactly how I was taught to lay type up by hand: The quotes go somewhat over the period. There are similar things going on when you put quotes at the beginning of a line: They hang out a little over the margin. If you have a period, like this. “Followed by a quote, like this,” The space between the period and the quote will be smaller than the space between a period and a capital letter. Most of this matters most with large type, such as titles or block quotes.
- lolc 11y agoInteresting detail. So technology should fix what technology broke and the debate would be over.
- vorg 11y agoIt's already done. Unicode provides non-spacing modifiers which will overlay the previous codepoint. So you can type, for example, either U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT) or U+030b (COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT) over the period or comma.
- lolc 11y agoI was wondering about that. But I don't think accent characters are intended for that. They don't seem to work for punctuation. We would have to use COMBINING DOT BELOW with a zero width space. "This looks baḍ̋ Edit: Actually make that a space, maybe it's the proportional font "This looks still bad ̣̋