Hello,
I was wondering why the closing double quotation mark of courier looks wrong to me. I heard that type writer fonts based on the original letters of type writer machines are using " for opening and closing speech. Because it was a matter of using as less space as possible so they took just one letter for different uses (sometimes the same thing with zero and the letter O – it was the same on the keyboard). But the double quotation marks of the Courier of Adobe, Monotype and Microsoft are looking like this which is another thing (maybe it is a silly question but I don't know):
Comments
They are common in US sign painting and hence sometimes also referred to as sign painters’ quotes. Here are a few typographic examples for such mirrored quotes:
Uses tagged with “sign painters’ quotes” on Fonts In Use
Fair enough. I will be more careful next time.
Wood
John
Kent
John Underwood
Kent
But most of all here:
— A type designer can decide to make rational (versus chirographic) quote marks. To me ideally where the opening ones are traditional (giving the reader their bearings) while the closing are vertically flipped (to avoid confusion with the apostrophe).
— A typographer can elect to use guillemets instead.
People who don't give readers enough credit for being able to adapt to either of the above are probably stuck in the conscious/display realm of typography.
BTW coincidentally the day after my post above I saw a publication (the Norwegian Air in-flight magazine) using both guillemets and mirrored quotes!
• has same semantic as 201C, but differs in appearance
That would make sense, because we rarely use <quoteleft> as a quote mark, yet it appears everywhere bass-ackward, masquerading as a word-preceding apostrophe (e.g. rock ‘n’ roll, summer of ‘69, etc.), thanks to so-called “smartquote” apps.
Actually, I have done that for proprietary typefaces for North American companies (although with the strange sensation that John Hudson and Thomas Phinney were standing behind me going tut-tut-tut).