Quarter Life Crisis

‘Special’ characters¶

737 words

John Gruber writes a piece against people who think that non-typography is a good idea in the 21st century.

Sure, I am biased in this as

• My mother tongue generously uses non-ASCII characters.
• I'm a bit of a typography freak myself.
• I like other languages. Their special characters are definitely part of them – and they're pretty.
• I dislike programmers, whose usual short-sightedness caused problems with non-ASCII characters in the first place.

Let me just elaborate on the last point – I think this even ties in with some of John's arguments. Typography has been around for centuries. A lot of experience went into making things in a way that they're easy and pleasant to read. That's why we've got elaborate typefaces, special dashes, ligatures etc. Then, a few decades ago, there came computers – Allegedly smart machines that immediately threw typography back into the stone age. Hooray to monospaces fonts and character sets that are suitable for writing C code! I sense irony here – the bitter kind.

It's not that computers per se are bad, it's really the programmers who are at fault. Decent typography for generic computer systems has at least been around with the advent of TeX in the late seventies – at least for Western languages that is. The mainstream software chose to ignore typography for a long while after this. Sure, there were 8-bit character sets on the Mac quite early (and also Language kits for middle and far Eastern languages) as was PageMaker, but at least as typography is concerned, TeX beats them hands down.

Of the mainstream applications, only InDesign seems to offer line-breaking algorithms that are non-trivial and may be a match for TeX (I don't have experience with those, though) – a cheer to the folks at Adobe, a multi-million dollar company for managing to incorporate things into their application only twenty years after Donald E Knuth started giving them away for free. A similar embarassment is the other 'flagship' DTP application XPress. The last time I used it, it still had severe problems with the special cases in German hyphenation. And judging from the magazines I see, those problems aren't solved. Well done.

But I digress. The orignal topic were special characters, which are not only important to typography but also to various languages. Of course not using them is not a solution. Not only is suggesting to not use them an insult to both the eye and those billions of people who can express themselves in something more subtle than C++, but it also doesn't make sense from a technical point of view.

Just consider the word Fahrvergnügen. It is of German origin, but seems to be used in English as well. Now people who don't like using umlauts or who use technology that cripples them enough to not be able to type them might type Fahrvergnuegen if they know a bit about German, Fahrvergn"ugen if they're 20th century TeX users, Fahrvernügen if their second language is HTML and Fahrvergnugen if they're English-speaking. I bet the extra effort needed to enable people to get reliable search results for this word (or all other words using special characters) – taking into account all the different cases – easily exceeds the effort 'saved' by not providing appropriate input methods and/or character sets.

In fact, MacOS X's Unicode support is good enough and easily accessible enough for programmers that users actually benefit from it. I've very rarely encountered problems with 'special' characters (and by this I mean 'really special' characters outside the standard 8-bit ranges) since I've switched to OS X (which also handles the problem with the different kinds of line breaks gracefully).

I guess, all I wanted to say is the following: Converting characters such as curly quotes into the appropriate format is trivial, i.e. it's a job software can and shoulddo for us. As long as software is limiting us in what we can to instead of enabling us to do more things that before, there's something seriously wrong with the software and we shouldn't use it.

That said, for those days when you need to convert proper Unicode characters to HTML character entities as John suggests in his post, I can heartily recommend our very own UnicodeChecker which lets you do this in any (proper) OS X application from the comfort of your services menu – or using AppleScript.

February 22, 2003, 18:55