On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Mark Swofford <mark@romanization.com> wrote:
Yes. Seriously.
In the vast majority of PG works, probably between 98 and 100 percent of quotation marks and apostrophes could be reliably corrected without the need for human eyeballing.
The problem is, if they can be automatically corrected, then they aren't carrying an information load. It's exactly those case where we have nested quotes and "'an't 'ee, ya' 'ee?" that they carry information load, and that's exactly where they'll get it wrong, and that's exactly where readers will slam into a brick wall and have to stop and wonder whether the curved quotes or their reading is wrong.
The lack of proper typography in this area is painful.
Shrug. This is the 21st century; a huge amount of text you read, whether from email or texts or Wikipedia and most other webpages, are not going to use curved quotes. If it's really painful, then you have a problem. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.