On Wed, January 25, 2012 8:00 pm, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
no matter whether you curl quotes or not, you're gonna make _some_ end-users unhappy if they can't reverse your decision to their liking. so, which of the file-formats you like allow that?
Theoretically, any of the XML-based formats, if you use named entities. For review (and because I am a pendant), the pertinent named entities are: ‘ - left single quotation mark ’ - right single quotation mark “ - left double quotation mark ” - right double quotation mark ' - apostrophe (valid XML character entity, but /not/ valid HTML) If you used one the first four named entities in place of a "curly" quote mark, whether the three-byte UTF-8 encode, or the 6-byte numeric entity, the display should always be the same. BUT... If you have a user agent that uses an external DTD, or uses an internal DTD that you can hack, you should be able to replace the values for these named entities to be straight quotes. (Remember, I'm talking theory, not necessarily practice.) In this case, you are not simply using a font that makes the glyphs /look/ like straight quotes, you would actually be /using/ straight quotes. You could even swap the values for single and double quotes to make British publications look like American ones, or vice-versa. It should be noted, as Mr. Adock did, that "The apostrophe is different from the closing single quotation mark (usually rendered identically but serving a different purpose)." For the greatest flexibility, apostrophes should be encoded as ' and not ’. Examples might be: "Texas hold 'em" or "that can't be done." Double/single swapping will look really weird if you hadn't encoded the apostrophe correctly.