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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks (2007)

44 points by exvi

by Findecanor

0 subcomment

In the '90s, MS-Windows by default used its own 8-bit character set CP-1252 that was a superset of ISO 8859-1 with a few additional characters, including left and right single and double quotation marks in 8859-1's unused code positions.
Microsoft Word used to "auto-correct" the ASCII codes 0x22 and 0x27 to those.
Also, ISO 8859-1 was the default character set for the web, and MS Word was in common use for making simple web pages... but without narrowing from CP-1252 to ISO 8859-1.
This had the effect that when you browsed one of those pages in a browser on another operating system, the quotation marks rendered as empty boxes ( = illegal character).

by xigoi

1 subcomments

I was wondering why `this hideous quotation style' is used in so many places. Good historical window.

by 1313ed01

1 subcomments

Special quotation marks sometimes end up in filenames (usually when I have saved a web page) and I hate trying to tab-complete or write globs for those. Of course it is equally annoying with other random unicode characters not present on my keyboard, but it mostly happens with quotation marks. (Yes, the solution is to copy-paste those characters in the terminal, but that is the annoying part, having to do that instead of just typing the next character).

by trashb

1 subcomments

Some language settings (on windows) will auto replace the '' and "" set for ʻʼ and “” as that is the correct spelling in the set language. There is also the lower quotes that can be used but it seems usually a normal comma and double comma is used as codepoint (U+002C, U+201E) ,’ „”.
This really messed me up when I started programming since those quotes will not work when writing in a language that expects a set of the same character but they may use the same glyph. This is one of the many reasons I have my systems set to English.
I agree that for a normal writing environment it may be advantageous to have it auto replace since it is also just easier to hit the same key twice and have it auto open/close.

by fainpul

4 subcomments

But how can I enter ’ (U+2019) on macOS (US layout) without going through some magic incantation? It’s impossible!

by shikaan

2 subcomments

Kinda OT: can anybody recognize the keyboard in the German keyboard shot? I have been looking for a similar ISO keyboard (with international layout) for a while