On Thu, Mar 15, 2007, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> [...]
> BTW: what about using `' instead of '', like gcc?
Sorry, but unfortunately that's bad typography and GCC is still using
this IMHO more or less because GCC is already a few decades old.
Using the backtick character (0x60) as some sort of nice looking
quotation mark is a relict of the old font days where it really looked
fine because the backtick (0x60) and both the acute accent (0xb4) and
apostrophe (0x27) characters looked very symmetrically.
A few years ago even X11 fixed the glyphs in the fonts and now in
an XTerm with even Adobe Courier a backtick character generates the
typographically correct grave accent, which is a thin accent (from
top-left to bottom-right), and the acute accent generates a thin accent
(from bottom-left to top-right) while the apostroph is usually thicker
and especially often more straight in the fonts.
As some people (especially in the US) are AFAIK unable to enter the
"acute accent" and instead usually enter the apostrophe character code
(because it looked exactly equal in the old X11 fonts), the resulting
"quotation" today looks funny: on the left a thin and angled grave
accent and on the right a thicker and straight apostrophe. And also from
a typographically correct point of view this is totally bogus AFAIK as
the accent characters are never intended to be used as quotation marks.
So, if Monotone wants to be both in the range of ASCII and still
typographically correct, IMHO the only way is to use the classical
(despite a little bit boring looking in some fonts) standard quotation
mark: " (0x22).