5 ms·
I think the American style looks better in non-fixed-width fonts, because it looks much closer to the way actual handwriting should look: the comma or period un
by javert 16y ago
I think the American style looks better in non-fixed-width fonts, because it looks much closer to the way actual handwriting should look: the comma or period underneath the quotation mark.
I suspect this is the reason people started doing it that way in the first place.
And I suspect people started doing it that way on both sides of the Atlantic. It's just that Britain ended up standardizing one way, America the other. (Possibly yet another instance of English language usage evolving more quickly in Britain than in America.)
I'd appreciate if anybody can confirm or deny this hypothesis. And I find it disappointing that the Slate article has no historical treatment of the issue.
(Honestly, both styles look weird to me in fixed-width fonts, which basically arose in tandem with the modern computer.)
- vorg 16y agoComputer fonts nowadays should be able to change ." and ". so the . is under the " and ditto ," and ", so the , is under the "
- bonzoesc 16y agoSomebody should totally engineer a font that does that; if Zapfino can have a special ligature for "Zapfino," you could certainly make ones for '".', '",', and '";'. And yes, I just mixed punctuation styles. Period-in-quotes simply looks better.
- Silhouette 16y agoThe technology to do this has been around for some time if you want to. However, this is the first time I recall seeing anyone advocate it for normal usage, and I have never encountered a pro-grade font that is typeset this way by default. Why would you want to remove potentially significant ordering information from punctuation, particularly when multiple punctuation marks in close proximity tend to be confusing enough already?
- billswift 16y agoActually, fixed-width fonts arose with the typewriter, which is how these sorts of differences have had time to get established. Variable-width fonts basically didn't exist except in professionally published documents before computers and word processing.
- javert 16y agoYou're right that fixed-width fonts would have arisen with the typewriter, my mistake. Variable-width fonts basically didn't exist except in... You're not giving enough credit to the printing press. Consider newspapers and books (even the Bible, which practically everybody read), which (I imagine) were printed with variable-width fonts for centuries, right from "the beginning" (i.e. Gutenburg).
- ghaff 16y agoRight--but newspapers and books are "professionally published documents." Latterly, there were variable-width fonts in typewriters but that was relatively late in the history of that instrument.
- javert 16y agothere were variable-width fonts in typewriters but that was relatively late in the history of that instrument Interesting, I did not know that.