Buggy Punctuation?¶
1246 words
Punctuation can be a bit of a nightmare. Not just for self-important journalists but simply because its so inconsistent across languages. A point of particular difference are quotation marks. While only a small number of characters are used for them in Western languages - single or duplicate occurrences of ‘ and its 180° rotation, as well as single or duplicate occurrences of a guillemet › and its 180° rotation, the Wikipedia entry on the topic suggests that for most of the possible combinations of quotation marks there exists a language using them.
In German we use „AH HELLO“ as the standard double quotation marks. And consequently ‚AH HELLO‘ are used as standard single quotation marks. I shall limit the following discussion to the latter case.
Here, the opening quotation mark may look like a comma, but it is actually representing Unicode Codepoint U+201A with the nice and descriptive name single low-9 quotation mark
which describes its form rather well. If you go through your fonts you will observe a bunch of different behaviours in this situation:
- in most of them it will look just like the comma,
- in some fonts this glyph is missing and thus replaced by that of a fallback font - leading to ugliness,
- in a few fonts the glyph looks just like the comma but the spacing is adjusted for the purpose (e.g. Helvetica),
- in a few fonts the glyph seems downright broken or ill-designed (e.g. Marker Felt where it looks like a straight bottom quotation mark to match the ‘dumb’ quotation mark as if a person who manages to use those glyphs would use ‘dumb’ quotation marks),
- in yet other fonts attention to detail shines through. E.g. the Neudeutsch Fraktur font from the Fraktur Mon Amour CD uses a slightly different glyph for the quotation mark than it uses for the comma. Not all that surprisingly, Zapfino ships with similar goodness and you will start spotting it in other fonts like Trajan or even as a subtle size variation in Verdana once you start looking.
This suggests that most of the time things will work just fine. But that it is really important for font creators or font system programmers to make sure that the comma glyph is used in most cases. In addition, results will likely look better if spacing is taken into account, but that is rarely done. A completely separate glyph seems to be even less common. It appears unnecessary for most ‘standard’ typefaces, but can be a nice touch if it is a small size variation or - for a peculiar typeface - a completely different design.
The Unicode lover feels compelled to add that apparently this character started off in Unicode 1.0 with the name low single comma quotation mark
, which was less descriptive and suggested a relation to the comma which should probably be regarded as a happy coincidence happening in some typefaces.
But let us move on to the closing quote where the real problem lies. That quote will be more familiar to non-German readers as it is U+2018, a.k.a. left single quotation mark
. Strangely its name suggests that it is a ‘left’ quotation mark, a problem which a description à la ‘single high-6 quotation mark’ similar to that of the quotation mark discussed above could have avoided. Yet, this is the character everybody uses for the German closing quotation mark (and there does not seem to be a viable alternative), so it seems that one has to assume that the Unicode name is potentially misleading or at least ambiguous about the glyphs purpose.
If one assumed that the glyph for U+2018 is only used for left quotation marks, then one might - although I will argue in a moment that one still should not - consider the glyphs provided by fonts like Tahoma or Verdana as correct:
With these examples in place, I am tempted to say that these already look wrong. It may not be immediately visible in 12px, but it certainly is at this size: The glyphs of the English opening and closing quotes are usually related by (something close to) a 180° rotation. In these fonts, however, they are related by a reflection. Rotations and reflections are inherently different operations on the plane as reflections change orientation like a mirror does while rotations do not. More pictorially speaking: Usual English quotation marks have the shapes of the digits 6 and 9, which up to a rotation is the same shape. In particular the ‘pointy’ end of the opening quotation mark points upwards while that of the closing quotation mark points downwards. From that point of view, one should consider the quotation marks in Tahoma and Verdana to be incorrect (wrong, buggy).
Once you start typing in German, there is not even need for a discussion about rotation versus reflection. You simply have a look at the result and notice that it looks wrong. You may have already spotted this in the first set of examples above, but here it comes again:
I guess I should turn this into a Mac OS X bug report as Apple ship these fonts with their system and according to Font Book they claim to support German text. But seeing that they are originally Microsoft’s and at least Verdana is one of the most frequently used fonts on the web because it is quite readable on screen and present on most computers, one wonders how many billions of wrong quotation marks are read every day because of this.
Many of those will not be noticeable because most writing on the web takes place in 12px font sizes, by writers who do not know about proper quotation marks to begin with and who are not using software that automatically does the conversion for them – even though such scripts are widely available to plug into most software systems. With the typical web reader probably matching those levels of competence, ‘everybody’ seems pretty much happy with that (the 1970s called and they want the abominable quality of their typewriter texts back…) Still, this seems like a sad state of affairs to me.
The problem could even be considered tragic as it effectively removes one (if not two) otherwise OK fonts from the already small list of web safe fonts if your site could contain proper quotation marks (rather than no quotation marks, ‘dumb’ quotation marks or guillemets). Because of this being an even more visible problem in German, it seems pretty much impossible to use these fonts on sites written in German (supposing that proper punctuation is to be used and people will not settle for ‘dumb’ or English quotation marks).
Of course my inner cynicist deems the chance of such a problem being solved to be pretty close to zero. This bug is so widely spread and quite likely you will find people who will object vocally to it being removed. Seeing that the typefaces are owned by Microsoft (a.k.a. the ‘let’s litter the world with Arial because we cannot afford licensing Helvetica’ company) and made by Monotype (a.k.a. the ‘let’s suck up to Microsoft’s money and create a shitty copy of Helvetica instead of telling them to just buy the proper one next door’ company) it doesn’t even seem likely they’ll give the slightest shit about such problems. And as usual Apple will feel that they didn’t create the problem (they just decided to license and ship it...), so hooray everything is perfect:
‘
