Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdfsdfdsfsf | Hacker News Reader

The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe.

See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').")

Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially available, at least, it is now. https://www.myfonts.com/collections/founders-caslon-font-itc

View on HN

I assume the author picked up the quotation mark habit from LaTeX. Backticks and apostrophes (single or double) get rendered as proper left and right quotation marks. It's also possible this was copy+pasted from a LaTeX source and they forgot to fix the quotation marks.

The italics on the page are also missing, for me at least. I am seeing them as obliques. The upright roman face is tilted, rather than using the separate set of italic glyphs. Some systems do this if the italic glyphs can't be found or something is misconfigured.

That's really informative!

Funnily enough, I picked up the habit of using graves for my opening quotes from working with old Unix software like ELisp without any context. I think it's a fine practice, particularly when used as markup that's transformed into curly-quotes on the user-faceing side, and it's even seeped into my handwriting as exaggerated opening quotes. I'll still draw nice curly quotes or mirrored ticks when writing neatly, but for sloppy writing and markdown alike, I find the clear distinction between opening and closing delimiters to be more readable than using just single quotes. On this, reasonable minds may differ c:

Thanks for sharing!

> I find the clear distinction between opening and closing delimiters to be more readable than using just single quotes.

The correct characters to use are ‘/“ and ’/”. There is a clear distinction between opening and closing delimiters. I think you're falling for a false dilemma brought on by outdated software that is limited to ASCII (i.e., stuck in the 1960s).

That really stuck out to me too. Given the author's care with other things and the fact that the quote marks in the dissertation itself look fine, I assume it's just an unfortunate accidental error and not the result of ignorance.

I'm stuck to the letters on my keyboard, though I suppose I could change that :p

anglo-centrist take of quotation rules

It's an article in English, being discussed in English.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

are you critizising my comment?

Anglo font. In an Anglo language. That is discussing the nuances of an Anglo typeface.

Ya think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com