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Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

> Unicode has only one apostrophe. The same one as ASCII apostrophe. The problem here is people using right single qoute as a "fancy" apostrophe when they should be using a font that renders apostrophe in the desired way.

No, the ASCII ‘quotes’ are inch and foot markers. Relying on a font to render the the inch and foot markers as quotes is a … unique … approach.

> I have to fix this junk all the time in CD-text and Musicbrainz metadata.

Wait, are you the guy whose Musicbrainz titles are constantly replacing my carefully- and properly-punctuated ones every time I sync? I beg you to reconsider.

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What input method are you using such that this is even possible? Nearly all English speakers are using keyboards with a single apostrophe key which inserts \x27, and could not insert any of the other quote characters even if they wanted to. As a result, nearly all extant English-language text uses \x27 for both apostrophes and single quotes, and all this Unicode prescriptivism is describing a convention that is clearly not the one that English actually follows.

> What input method are you using such that this is even possible?

ibus. In my X settings the physical Caps Lock key is turned into Compose, and then I can easily type ‘ with Compose <' (and vice-versa), ’ with Compose >' (ditto), “ with Compose <" (ditto), ” with Compose >" (ditto), ß with Compose ss, þ with Compose th, Þ with Compose TH, æ with Compose ae, Æ with Compose AE, … with Compose .., — with Compose ---, – with Compose --. and so forth.

https://github.com/kragen/xcompose offers an excellent XCompose file with over a thousand wonderful Compose mappings. Highly recommended!

> the ASCII ‘quotes’ are inch and foot markers.

There are special symbols for those. There is no other symbol for the apostrophe

> Relying on a font to render the the inch and foot markers as quotes is a … unique … approach

No, you would rely on a font to render those dedicated inch symbols as inch markers

Besides you can only do the display substitution with context awareness, so that ' as inches won't be changed to quotes, but ' in titles will be

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