When “quoteleft” should look like an apostrophe

Nick Shinn

I’m presently doing some proprietary display fonts for an American company, and am considering making the <quoteleft> identical to the <quoteright>. 

I figure that the quoteleft character will never get used—unless an app “smart-quotes” it for an apostrophe at the beginning of abbreviated words, in which case it should indeed look like an apostrophe.

Here’s the frequent fail that occurs with a previous font, that has the “correct” glyph.

What could possibly go wrong? And if it did, would that be worse than the present fail?

Christian Thalmann

Nick Shinn said:

I figure that the quoteleft character will never get used—unless an app “smart-quotes” it for an apostrophe at the beginning of abbreviated words, in which case it should indeed look like an apostrophe.

If there's a «smart» substitution of apostrophes to quotelefts, wouldn't it also trigger in the case of ‘simple quotes’ typed as apostrophes at the beginning of words? In which case you'd be left with something ’weird’.

James Puckett

Nick Shinn said:

Here’s the frequent fail that occurs with a previous font, that has the “correct” glyph.

What could possibly go wrong? And if it did, would that be worse than the present fail?

Quotes are misused constantly. The designers using them don’t notice, the proofreaders and editors don’t notice, and the prepress staff don’t notice. I don’t think anyone is actually using the wrong glyphs. The orthographies of quotation marks and apostrophes are just in flux. No matter what you do it’s right to one reader, wrong to another, and almost nobody will ever notice or care.

Nick Shinn

wouldn't it also trigger in the case of ‘simple quotes’ typed as apostrophes at the beginning of words?

1) for a display type, quote marks are highly unlikely
2) the norm in North America is double quotes
3) the occurrences would be far fewer than the usual “smart quote” fail