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There are many wonderful characters that don't have their own individual keys on your keyboard. Heck, there are a lot of characters that require at least one me

There are many wonderful characters that don't have their own individual keys on your keyboard. Heck, there are a lot of characters that require at least one meta key to be pressed in combination with another key, and single quote marks are accessible in exactly that way on my keyboard too (Mac, YMMV). And, yes, autocorrect can be a PITA, especially when it's not actually getting things correct, but that's a different, albeit related, issue. We should really refer to quote marks, or apostrophe (which are often rendered as curly, and are the characters that autocorrect switches to), and the prime symbol (which is the unadulterated character that you get with the non-meta-pressed key on your keyboard), rather than using the term 'smart quotes'.

kps 13y ago
Not to detract from the substance of your post, but the unshifted keyboard key pretty much universally generates an ASCII apostrophe (U+0027, '), not a prime (U+2032, ′, as used for feet and minutes, and while I'm babbling, the addition of a second prime for seconds is not a coincidence). ~~~~ wavy lines starting flashback ~~~~ ASCII 1967, in conjunction with its European counterpart ECMA-6, permitted the visual appearance of some characters, including the apostrophe, to be modified so that they could be used as accents when overstruck¹: ' " , ^ ` ~ ˊ ¨ ¸ ˆ ˋ ˉ (using the modern Unicode spacing modifiers) Later versions of ECMA-6 suggested that the accent interpretation be used only when the character was actually overstruck: In the 7-bit character set, some printing symbol may be designed to permit their use for the composition of ac- cented letters when necessary for general interchange of information. A sequence of three characters, comprising a letter, BACKSPACE and one of these symbols, is needed for this composition; the symbol is then regarded as a dia- critical sign. It should be noted that these symbols take on their diacritical significance only when they precede or follow the character BACKSPACE; for example, the symbol corresponding to the code combination 2/7 normally has the significance of APOSTROPHE, but becomes the diacritical sign ACUTE ACCENT when preceded or followed by the character BACKSPACE.² Although this was fine for the printing teletypes in use when ASCII was first designed, early video terminals were too dumb to handle overstrikes, so it never caught on. ¹Revised American Standard Code for Information Interchange, from http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html ²ECMA-6: 7-Bit coded Character Set, 4th Edition, August 1973, from http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-6,%204th%20Edition,%20August%201973.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ~~~~ wavy lines ending flashback ~~~~
- raldi 13y ago
  Please don't abuse tildes in this way; use the proper Unicode wavy-line character: ⌇
  - cnvogel 13y ago
    But your wavy line has the wrong orientation... 2307 ⌇ WAVY LINE http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf What you most likely intended to present as an alternative is the... 301C 〜 WAVE DASH http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf unicode smiley ➩ ☺
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  OK, looks like I need to go back to school for a bit before attempting to comment on this again! Thanks for the history lesson.

kps 13y ago

Not to detract from the substance of your post, but the unshifted keyboard key pretty much universally generates an ASCII apostrophe (U+0027, '), not a prime (U+2032, ′, as used for feet and minutes, and while I'm babbling, the addition of a second prime for seconds is not a coincidence). ~~~~ wavy lines starting flashback ~~~~ ASCII 1967, in conjunction with its European counterpart ECMA-6, permitted the visual appearance of some characters, including the apostrophe, to be modified so that they could be used as accents when overstruck¹: ' " , ^ ` ~ ˊ ¨ ¸ ˆ ˋ ˉ (using the modern Unicode spacing modifiers) Later versions of ECMA-6 suggested that the accent interpretation be used only when the character was actually overstruck: In the 7-bit character set, some printing symbol may be designed to permit their use for the composition of ac- cented letters when necessary for general interchange of information. A sequence of three characters, comprising a letter, BACKSPACE and one of these symbols, is needed for this composition; the symbol is then regarded as a dia- critical sign. It should be noted that these symbols take on their diacritical significance only when they precede or follow the character BACKSPACE; for example, the symbol corresponding to the code combination 2/7 normally has the significance of APOSTROPHE, but becomes the diacritical sign ACUTE ACCENT when preceded or followed by the character BACKSPACE.² Although this was fine for the printing teletypes in use when ASCII was first designed, early video terminals were too dumb to handle overstrikes, so it never caught on. ¹Revised American Standard Code for Information Interchange, from http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html ²ECMA-6: 7-Bit coded Character Set, 4th Edition, August 1973, from http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-6,%204th%20Edition,%20August%201973.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... ~~~~ wavy lines ending flashback ~~~~

raldi 13y ago
Please don't abuse tildes in this way; use the proper Unicode wavy-line character: ⌇
- cnvogel 13y ago
  But your wavy line has the wrong orientation... 2307 ⌇ WAVY LINE http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf What you most likely intended to present as an alternative is the... 301C 〜 WAVE DASH http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf unicode smiley ➩ ☺
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
OK, looks like I need to go back to school for a bit before attempting to comment on this again! Thanks for the history lesson.