Re: ASCII-only startup message?

["Clément Pit--Claudel" <clement.pit@gmail.com>]

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Hi Drew,

On 12/27/2015 01:17 AM, Drew Adams wrote:

> I have never seen any doc or typography guideline that favors
> a quotation mark over an apostrophe for English contractions,
> possessives, or non-word plurals.  Quite the contrary.  These
> use cases are precisely the raison d'être for the apostrophe.

I don't know much about this topic, so this may not be the type of documents you're looking for. Are you aware of the following passage, on page 274 of the latest Unicode standard (page 19 of http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode8.0.0/ch06.pdf)? I believe that David Kastrup already quoted it.

> Apostrophes
> 
> U+0027 apostrophe is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. For
> historical reasons, U+0027 is a particularly overloaded character. In ASCII, it
> is used to represent a punctuation mark (such as right single quotation mark,
> left single quotation mark, apostrophe punctuation, vertical line, or prime) or
> a modifier letter (such as apostrophe modifier or acute accent). Punctuation
> marks generally break words; modifier letters generally are considered part of a
> word. When text is set, U+2019 right single quotation mark is preferred as
> apostrophe, but only U+0027 is present on most keyboards. Software commonly
> offers a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 apostrophe to a
> contextually selected curly quotation glyph. In these systems, a U+0027 in the
> data stream is always represented as a straight vertical line and can never
> represent a curly apostrophe or a right quotation mark.
> 
> Letter Apostrophe.
> 
> U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe is preferred where the apostrophe is to
> represent a modifier letter (for example, in transliterations to indicate a
> glottal stop). In the latter case, it is also referred to as a letter
> apostrophe.
> 
> Punctuation Apostrophe.
> 
> U+2019 right single quotation mark is preferred where the character is to
> represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: “We’ve been here before.” In
> this latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe.
> 
> An implementation cannot assume that users’ text always adheres to the
> distinction between these characters. The text may come from different sources,
> including mapping from other character sets that do not make this distinction
> between the letter apostrophe and the punctuation apostrophe/right single
> quotation mark. In that case, all of them will generally be represented by
> U+2019.
> 
> The semantics of U+2019 are therefore context dependent. For example, if
> surrounded by letters or digits on both sides, it behaves as an in-text
> punctuation character and does not separate words or lines.

I understand this as an explicit endorsement of "There’s" over "There's", and of l"it’s the _wrong thing_" over "it's the _wrong thing_". Mark Davis (the president of the Unicode consortium) clarified this in an email back in 1999: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML017/0558.html

Cheers,
Clément.


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