From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Mar 27 2005 - 14:50:54 CST
"Patrick Andries" wrote:
> The same could be said of the apostrophe in French : not the ASCII value
> (U+0027) but U+2019 is what should be used if Unicode capability is
> available. Reality is there are a lot of pages with U+0027 (unfortunately).
Don't say what apostrophe should be. What prevails here is the fact that national *standard* keyboards (in France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, ... but also for English in US and UK) simply don't have a key for this apostrophe, and just generate a simple ASCII single quote.
The national standards take precedence here, so the apostrophe is in fact not used by almost aveyone. One the opposite, the ASCII quote is much more often replaced by typographic quotes (comma shaped, or 6/9-shaped) within carefully typesetted documents.
I would say that, today, the ASCII quote best represents the linguistic apostrophe, and that authors only change the encoding for the cases where this character is a punctuation (except in programming language where it is not a punctuation but a syntaxic delimiter for string or character constants).
For this reason, many typographic fonts shape the ASCII quote as a regular comma-shaped apostrophe, and use the rounded 6-shaped or 9-shaped glyph for the case where it represents an opening or closing quote punctuation. And effectively, many "smart" word processors will attempt to replace these ASCII quotes only when they are punctuations, but never when they are apostrophes.
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