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This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would

This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the document. Unfortunately, users (and product managers of competitors) misinterpreted the label in the check-box in the UI that enabled this feature, and thought that "Smart Quotes" meant that the name of the quote characters somehow had the word "smart" in it. But, no, it just meant "turn on the intelligent logic for which quote to insert into the document." Source: Me, 1988 or so, working on FrameMaker. I don't think there's a reference to the word pair "Smart Quotes" anywhere earlier than the FrameMaker ~2 manual, and certainly not in any book on typography. I'd be happy to learn that I am wrong, if anybody has a pointer.

neilv 4y ago
TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)
- drfuchs 4y ago
  Interestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature. It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX). Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I suspect if you dug back you'd find that very old monospace fonts had ` and ' looking like mirrors of each other, but once they realized that nobody uses ` and instead always uses ' and ", they made them vertical so that they wouldn't look "that bad".
    - anjbe 4y ago
      In the old days of ASCII several characters were heavily overloaded. On teletypes it was not unusual to create accented characters by typing ` or ' (which looked more like ´), then backspacing and typing a vowel, to get (e.g.) è or é. The same could be done with ~ to create ñ, if the tilde were high up like ˜, or with " to simulate an umlaut. And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus. If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments: - example (U+002D hyphen‐minus) + example (plus) − example (U+2212 minus)
      - drfuchs 4y ago
        And typewriters, before that. They all had only a single key for Apostrophe as well as Single Left Quote and Single Right Quote. In fact, since most(?) manual typewriters also lacked a "One / Exclamation" key, there was a fourth use: for "1" you typed lower-case L (yikes); while to get an exclamation point, you had to type a period, then backspace, then overstrike with an apostrophe (which is yet another reason the apostrophe et. al. character was vertical!)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - thangalin 4y ago
    KeenWrite[0] is my free, open-source plain text Markdown editor that exports to XHTML. That XHTML is passed into ConTeXt (typesetting software) to produce beautifully typeset PDFs. On the way from Markdown to XHTML, KeenWrite passes the XHTML through KeenQuotes[1], my straight quote curling library, to encode quotation marks as HTML entities. This means ' becomes lsquo, rsquo, or apos, depending on the context (pun intended, sorry). Those HTML entities are then curled correctly when any theme[2] is applied. What bytes is not having a separate glyph for a curled apostrophe because it makes detection of British (or nested) quotations a difficult chore for natural language processors. To get a curled apostrophe, word processors inject the semantically incorrect right-curled single quote, which ought to be reserved for a closing quotation mark exclusively. There are a few fonts that do curl the apostrophe, such as GFS Didot[3]. [0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/ https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/ [2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xhtml/xml-entities.tex https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xht... [3]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/GFS+Didot https://fonts.google.com/specimen/GFS+Didot
D13Fd 4y ago
I think “smart quotes” is fine as a name, since most people who type them still do it automatically via a context-based logic (whether it’s a word processor or text box input on an iPhone). And it works better than “curly quotes” since they are not curly in some fonts. If you’re going to be pedantic, I’m not sure that “left-quote” or “right-quote” is correct either. Shouldn’t it be “left double quotation mark” or “right double quotation mark”?
- svat 4y ago
  I know you said “most people”, but I always type these typographically correct quotes manually (no automatic substitution or “smart” quotes involved). It's Opt+[ (etc) on macOS, for example. So the name is disorienting for me at least, and as the top comment said, they predate computers and weren't called “smart” then. But see also https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ :-)
  - lupire 4y ago
    If you learn them as "double quote brackets" just like "round brackets", "square brackets", "angle brackets", and "curly brackets" then the key name is not disorienting.
yellow_lead 4y ago
Somehow, my chinese language option still uses smart quotes. For instance, “一個句子”
aendruk 4y ago
Thank you. There’s nothing “smart” about my quotation marks; I type them with physical keys just like any other punctuation. Left: “ Right: Shift+“ Typewriter: AltGr+“
Beltalowda 4y ago
Words change; terminology changes; language changes. It is the way of things. In that sense I think "straight quotes" are fine too, although “smart quotes” arguably look a bit nicer, but that's a matter of personal taste IMO. Related comment from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626
rogual 4y ago
As a Brit I always used to interpret "Smart Quotes" with the old-fashioned definition of smart that some people still use here, i.e. presentable, nice-looking, clean-cut.

neilv 4y ago

TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes. (FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)

drfuchs 4y ago
Interestingly, the logic of mapping of two single quotes into a double quote was not built into TeX; rather, the metadata in each of the standard fonts simply used the ligature mechanism to handle it, just as they would specify that "f" followed by "t" should turn into the single-character "ft" ligature. It's a shame that ASCII (and its visual representation on terminals from most manufacturers) has a wonderfully slanty left-quote character, but the right-quote character is typically shown as vertical. This makes TeX input files that contain quotations look kind of yucky, which is all the more galling as the original SAIL terminals had symmetric quotes, so everything looked beautiful there (never mind also having proper uparrow and downarrow characters to indicate superscript and subscript, rather than the ugly caret and underscore characters that we're all stuck with in ASCII-land TeX). Source: Me, 1980 or so, working on TeX and Metafont.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect if you dug back you'd find that very old monospace fonts had ` and ' looking like mirrors of each other, but once they realized that nobody uses ` and instead always uses ' and ", they made them vertical so that they wouldn't look "that bad".
  - anjbe 4y ago
    In the old days of ASCII several characters were heavily overloaded. On teletypes it was not unusual to create accented characters by typing ` or ' (which looked more like ´), then backspacing and typing a vowel, to get (e.g.) è or é. The same could be done with ~ to create ñ, if the tilde were high up like ˜, or with " to simulate an umlaut. And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus. If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments: - example (U+002D hyphen‐minus) + example (plus) − example (U+2212 minus)
    - drfuchs 4y ago
      And typewriters, before that. They all had only a single key for Apostrophe as well as Single Left Quote and Single Right Quote. In fact, since most(?) manual typewriters also lacked a "One / Exclamation" key, there was a fourth use: for "1" you typed lower-case L (yikes); while to get an exclamation point, you had to type a period, then backspace, then overstrike with an apostrophe (which is yet another reason the apostrophe et. al. character was vertical!)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- thangalin 4y ago
  KeenWrite[0] is my free, open-source plain text Markdown editor that exports to XHTML. That XHTML is passed into ConTeXt (typesetting software) to produce beautifully typeset PDFs. On the way from Markdown to XHTML, KeenWrite passes the XHTML through KeenQuotes[1], my straight quote curling library, to encode quotation marks as HTML entities. This means ' becomes lsquo, rsquo, or apos, depending on the context (pun intended, sorry). Those HTML entities are then curled correctly when any theme[2] is applied. What bytes is not having a separate glyph for a curled apostrophe because it makes detection of British (or nested) quotations a difficult chore for natural language processors. To get a curled apostrophe, word processors inject the semantically incorrect right-curled single quote, which ought to be reserved for a closing quotation mark exclusively. There are a few fonts that do curl the apostrophe, such as GFS Didot[3]. [0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [1]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/ https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/ [2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xhtml/xml-entities.tex https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/blob/main/xht... [3]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/GFS+Didot https://fonts.google.com/specimen/GFS+Didot

D13Fd 4y ago

I think “smart quotes” is fine as a name, since most people who type them still do it automatically via a context-based logic (whether it’s a word processor or text box input on an iPhone). And it works better than “curly quotes” since they are not curly in some fonts. If you’re going to be pedantic, I’m not sure that “left-quote” or “right-quote” is correct either. Shouldn’t it be “left double quotation mark” or “right double quotation mark”?

svat 4y ago
I know you said “most people”, but I always type these typographically correct quotes manually (no automatic substitution or “smart” quotes involved). It's Opt+[ (etc) on macOS, for example. So the name is disorienting for me at least, and as the top comment said, they predate computers and weren't called “smart” then. But see also https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/ :-)
- lupire 4y ago
  If you learn them as "double quote brackets" just like "round brackets", "square brackets", "angle brackets", and "curly brackets" then the key name is not disorienting.

yellow_lead 4y ago

Somehow, my chinese language option still uses smart quotes. For instance, “一個句子”

aendruk 4y ago

Thank you. There’s nothing “smart” about my quotation marks; I type them with physical keys just like any other punctuation. Left: “ Right: Shift+“ Typewriter: AltGr+“

Beltalowda 4y ago

Words change; terminology changes; language changes. It is the way of things. In that sense I think "straight quotes" are fine too, although “smart quotes” arguably look a bit nicer, but that's a matter of personal taste IMO. Related comment from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31792626

rogual 4y ago

As a Brit I always used to interpret "Smart Quotes" with the old-fashioned definition of smart that some people still use here, i.e. presentable, nice-looking, clean-cut.