Quark Forums

As an old school designer who remembers the days when professional typesetters actually set type, I really miss the accuracy that professionals provided to the field. Among the most annoying typographical nightmares of the digital era is the ubiquitous use of a half-quote mark instead of an apostrophe . For instance, when a year is abbreviated as '98, the mark at the beginning is supposed to be an apostrophe, which curls away from the word, with the dot at the top. But in way too many instances, you see it make it to print as a half-quote mark, that is, it curls inward toward the word, with the dot at the bottom.

Why? Because the text engines in design software always default to the start quote when using the quote key, and designers don't know any better. Sure it's easy to type the correct character, but most designers aren't trained in correct typography.

I've never understood why the text engine can't be programmed to simply use an apostrophe as the default whenever a numerical digit or a lower-case letter follows. If it's smart enough to create "Smart Quotes" at all, why can't they be made a bit smarter and default to something which -- in about 99.9% of cases -- will actually be the correct mark?

Man I can't agree more - I'd love to see certain values retained rather than lost.

The amount of pieces I see, even logos (like Today's Group - a logo I had to use this morning) with prime (inch) marks before the s rather than a correct mark! Drives me skatty.

But then so do other things - the lack of serif fonts used in body copy (much easier to read, but no, current fashion is for sans), invented words (breastfed and breastmilk were today's irritations), etc..

Guess I'm a bit old school too. Though I don't mind evolution of the language, losing some things is just poor, frankly.

On a similar vein to your post, though, is the fact that pre v7 XPress could recognise the difference between a prime and a 'curly' quote in the find/replace dialog. Now it can't. Aargh.

Greg

Isn't it fun when you're working on a file that uses it a LOT!? And you have to resort to pasting to save your sanity? Which brings me to another possible improvement:

Why can't you designate more than one item to the clipboard, simply by adding a 1, 2, etc. to the copy command?

With regard to the typographic niceties... (well no, the basics actually) I'm singing from the same hymn-sheet as you three.

I'm relatively fortunate, though, in that I don't usually work with huge amounts of text that I haven't either edited, re-written, or originated myself; so formatting the details "as I go" for punctuation, small cap use or whatever is not so much of a hassle as a part what I do.

Then there are the people who insist on typing 1980’s music

Or abbreviating it as 80’s music, when they mean ’80s music...

Don’t get me started. My daughter is supposed to understand the difference between colons and semi colons for her SATS test (11 years old) – she’s getting the hang of it, which is more than I can say for 99% of the population.

And then there are the justifications those people use for writing "80's music"...
"It's music belonging to the eighties." they say.
So that should be 80s' music, surely? That might be acceptable of itself... since the meaning is unambiguous, even without the 19.

Or, "It's because 80's is an abbreviation of eighties..." How the heck does that work? It's an abbreviation of 1980s - as Emma points out; but that leads us to '80's or '80s', both of which I've seen used and both of the which look ridiculous - especially if the first apostrophe is actually a quote-mark, which would put a whole different emphasis on '80s'.

Apologies - I'm ranting again.

There's been a nice discussion in the letters column of the UK's Private Eye magazine as to whether - how I hate 'as to whether' - their 'Pedants Corner' column should be called Pedants' Corner, Pedant's Corner or Pedants Corner. In the last couple of issues they've headed it Ped'ants Corner.

D

Excellent!

I guess you've heard this:
"Who led the Pedants' Revolt?"
"Which Tyler."
Yes, I thought so...

Sounds like a job for the Which Finder General.

Which? Find her!

Bring out the comfy chair.