From: Andreas Prilop (nhtcapri@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2006 - 03:41:32 CDT
[ I restrict myself to single quotation marks. ]
[ Everything is the same for double quotation marks. ]
On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, John Hudson wrote:
> Typography is determined by typographers and type designers,
> not by standards committees (witness the euro symbol).
But we do speak about code positions here: U+2018 and U+201B.
This is a question of standards. You can make a Latin letter "g"
according to your own taste, but you cannot put it into an
arbitrary code position.
Nobody objects to the *glyphs* in Verdana, I believe.
The objection is against the abuse of code position U+2018.
> Now, it may well be the case that some of the choices that
> type designers make in the design of quotation marks may not be
> desirable in a specifically German context. There is nothing
> unusual about this: it is very rare for a single typeface to
> work equally well for all languages, and following the Unicode
> glyph charts doesn't make it so.
You argument would be perfectly okay if we had only *two* (high)
quotation marks: U+2018 and U+2019.
However, we do have *three* (high) quotation marks:
U+2018, U+2019, U+201B.
The Unicode standard says:
2018 left single q.m. = single turned comma q.m.
2019 right single q.m. = single comma q.m.
201B single high-reversed-9 q.m. = single reversed comma q.m.
"turned" means "rotated", certainly not "mirrored".
"reversed" means "mirrored".
If you do not agree, please give us *your* definition of U+201B.
> There are plenty of typefaces that I would not use to typeset German...
> or French, or Czech, or even English.
Remember: We are speaking of such prominent typefaces as Courier [New]
and Verdana. Are you proposing that these should not be used for
German and we have to find other typefaces? Why is there a German
"ß" in these typefaces?
> Now, OpenType does provide a mechanism for language specific
> glyph variants, so it is entirely possible that a font might have
> different forms for quotation marks for different languages,
> thereby addressing your concerns.
No, it is not about language specific glyph variants, but about
code positions U+2018 and U+201B. The mechanism is provided by
the Unicode standard. However, I think the design of the quotation
marks in Verdana etc. is just lazy because current software
(programs & keyboard layouts) does not provide access to U+201B,
which is outside cp1252 and MacRoman.
The glyph in Verdana is fine - but please use U+201B for it!
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