Apostrophes
This morning I ran across a little microblog outlining bad apostrophes. I like humor like this, and the level of detail that folks are willing to drill-down to make critical remarks.
This reminds me of a situation at work this week where I poked fun at a colleague who misused quotation marks. In fact, she wanted to draw so much attention to the title of her document, she
- underlined it,
- italicized it,
- made the font larger, and
- put it in quotation marks.
And there are now too many good Flickr pools and websites devoted to the quotation mark stuff.
But if you had visited that link above, do you see what’s wrong in the photos? The apostrophes are not real ones: they are tick marks, or straight, and not curved. Despite my Apple Bluetooth keyboard showing quotes and the apostrophe at an oblique angle, when I hit that character, it appears too as a straight, up-and-down mark in my copy of MarsEdit.
How do they appear curved in the correct typographical way here on JohnHendron.net?
I used two text filters on my blogs: one is called Markdown, which translates special codes into XHTML. The second is SmartyPants, which translates my quotes and things like double-hypens into true dashes. You can install these into WordPress for typographically sound results!