Re: New translation posted

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sat Feb 03 2007 - 02:06:35 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: New translation posted"

    On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    > Also I would suggest replacing every vertical apostrophe-quote by an
    > oblique apostrophe (high comma, which should show as a wedge glyph in
    > sans-serif fonts, or as a 9-shaped glyph in serif fonts),

    I think you mean that U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("Ascii apostrophe") should be
    replaced by U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ("typographer's
    apostrophe"). Yes, it should. U+0027 is not a correct apostrophe in any
    human language that I heard of, though some rumors say that in Danish, it
    is an officially accepted alternative to U+2019 - but I think that if some
    officials decided so, they didn't really understand the issue.

    The glyph for U+2019 is curved (curly) in a long typographic tradition.
    _Some_ sans-serif fonts, such as Verdana and Tahoma, have an oblique wedge
    glyph (often greatly resembling PRIME), but that's poor typographic
    design, and many sans-serif fonts like Arial and Lucida Sans have an
    adequate curved glyph. This is strong enough reason to avoid Verdana and
    Tahoma in many contexts.

    So I would definitely not call U+2019 "oblique".

    The applicable CSS style sheet,
    http://www.unicode.org/webscripts/standard_styles.css
    contains the following list of suggested fonts:
    Arial, Geneva, sans-serif
    Both Arial and Geneva have a curved glyph for U+2019. The generic font
    name sans-serif could of course refer to anything, but I would expect it
    to denote a font with a curved U+2019 almost always.

    > This page should be a good example showing the recommanded typography
    > and orthography.

    Agreed. If Unicode.org pages don't use characters correctly, how could we
    expect common people to do so? :-)

    Just looking at the list of translations of "What is Unicode?" I see
    several characters that look suspiciously like U+0027 APOSTROPHE.

    -- 
    Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 03 2007 - 02:43:47 CST