3 ms·

> It looks like shit in any font in which the apostrophe is a little nine, which is historically correct. What you want is a little "six" on one side and a "nin

by Zarel 9y ago

> It looks like shit in any font in which the apostrophe is a little nine, which is historically correct. What you want is a little "six" on one side and a "nine" on the other, or at least some approximation thereof. Even if the apostrophe is crappily rendered as a little vertical notch, it still pairs with a backwards-slanted `. > (The representation of apostrophe as a little vertical notch, I suspect, caters to literals in programming languages.) "Historically", U+0027 has been used as all of an opening quote, a closing quote, an apostrophe, a prime symbol, an ʻokina, a modifier, etc. So the historically correct thing is render it as a vertical notch so it looks non-horrible in all these uses, and render U+2018 and U+2019 as the "little nine" and "little six" symbols. You don't need to speculate what the representation caters to; the Unicode spec actually does explain this (see Unicode 9.0 Chapter 6 Section 2)... > The idea that people should change their behavior because of which font is default on the Windows cmd.exe console is laughable. So your alternative is to change behavior because of which font is default on a system from 1984 which no one uses anymore?

kazinator 9y ago
Open any random book in the English language printed in the last 200 years. All the apostrophes look like a little nine: in contractions like it's, and the possessive 's. That's the character that was included in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Image: http://www.worldpowersystems.com/J/codes/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG http://www.worldpowersystems.com/J/codes/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG The glyph appearing in the standard looks like a little 9. It is denoted as "APOS" in parentheses. A reference to it is made in A6.8, calling it "apostrophe". Wikipedia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe) page refers to a vertical notch glyph as a "typewriter apostrophe". The normal non-typewriter apostrophe looks like a comma. Okina? That indicates a glottal stop in some languages none of which are English, and so which were understandably not represented in the American Standard Code.
- Zarel 9y ago
  > That's the character that was included in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Yes, and that's the character that was immediately overloaded to used to mean a whole bunch of other things, because ASCII only included 95 printable characters, and did not include a prime symbol, an 'okina, or a left single quotation mark. For that reason, U+0027 is not an apostrophe anymore. As the only ASCII character that can be used for a long list of uses, it's been massively overloaded, which is why Unicode currently defines U+0027 as a typewriter apostrophe and U+2019 as a real apostrophe.

by Zarel 9y ago

kazinator 9y ago

Open any random book in the English language printed in the last 200 years. All the apostrophes look like a little nine: in contractions like it's, and the possessive 's. That's the character that was included in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Image: http://www.worldpowersystems.com/J/codes/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG http://www.worldpowersystems.com/J/codes/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG The glyph appearing in the standard looks like a little 9. It is denoted as "APOS" in parentheses. A reference to it is made in A6.8, calling it "apostrophe". Wikipedia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe) page refers to a vertical notch glyph as a "typewriter apostrophe". The normal non-typewriter apostrophe looks like a comma. Okina? That indicates a glottal stop in some languages none of which are English, and so which were understandably not represented in the American Standard Code.

Zarel 9y ago
> That's the character that was included in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Yes, and that's the character that was immediately overloaded to used to mean a whole bunch of other things, because ASCII only included 95 printable characters, and did not include a prime symbol, an 'okina, or a left single quotation mark. For that reason, U+0027 is not an apostrophe anymore. As the only ASCII character that can be used for a long list of uses, it's been massively overloaded, which is why Unicode currently defines U+0027 as a typewriter apostrophe and U+2019 as a real apostrophe.