I think it is time to mention a rather annoying problem with German
keyboard drivers that misleads users significantly. If your company
produces keyboard drivers, *please* forward this message to the engineer
in charge for serious consideration.
I estimate that more than half of all Germans who type English texts on
German keyboards enter
U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT
instead of
U+0027 APOSTROPHE
or
U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (preferred apostrophe)
when they write English texts. This error is difficult to spot on
low-resolution screens, but the result looks horrible if printed out on
a high-resolution device (at least to anyone with a typographer's eye).
This problem shows up not only in casual emails but also in professional
print publications, CD cover texts, poster's, and many other places.
Many Germans write "it�s" and "doesn�t" instead of "it's" and "doesn't".
The reasons for this common user error are easy to spot:
If you look at the attached photo of a German keyboard, you will find an
acute/grave (�/`) key left of backspace and a number-sign/apostrophe key
(#/') below it. The German language doesn't use apostrophes or acute/
grave accents, therefore non-programmers are not very familiar with the
difference between these keys. Since the acute accent is reachable
without pressing shift and looks on low-res screens almost like an
English apostrophe, it is misused for that purpose frequently.
This happens today very frequently both with MS-Windows and X Window
System users.
What can be done to solve this problem?
a) Make sure that your spell checkers do flag and handle conveniently
the case where accidentally the U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT instead of
the U+0027 APOSTROPHE key has been pressed.
b) The key left of backspace used to be a non-spacing key on German
typewriters that allowed to put grave, acute, and circumflex (= grave
+ acute) onto other letters for writing French. This accent key should
again always be configured as a non-spacing key, because this will make
intuitively clear that U+0060 and U+00B4 should not be used for
anything but entering French accents on to of other base letters.
If the key becomes a non-spacing one, entering an apostrophe via
Shift-# will become the more convenient and more frequently used
way, and then all the usual smart-quoting algorithms in editors that
automagically substitute U+0027 with U+2018/U+2019 will be fully
operational again.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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