Quotation-Marks.com

Quotation-Marks.com - Typewriter Quotation Marks

“Ambidextrous” quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. However, modern word processors have started to convert text to use curved quotes (see below). Some computer systems designed in the past had proper opening and closing quotes, with a few machines even making a distinction between regular apostrophes (e.g. couldn't) and apostrophes that show possession (e.g. Dave’s car). However, the standard ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only made three quotation marks available: ", ' and the dubious backquote ` (also referred to as a backtick and a letterless grave accent). The Unicode standard includes typographic and a variety of international quotation marks.

Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early '90s, actually drew straight quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):

“Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.

'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

The grave accent (`) could then be used to supply single quote marks. This use resulted in fonts with an open quote glyph at the grave accent position. This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double-quote, so many people resorted to using sets of two single quotes for punctuation, which would look like the following:

``Good morning, Dave," said HAL.

`Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

However, the appearance of these characters has varied greatly from font to font. On systems which provide straight quotes and grave accents the appearance is poor. Unicode specifies that ASCII single and double quotes should be vertical rather than angled, which means if such tricks are used with a font that follows the rules the result will look rather messy (see next sample). On the other hand Unicode also provides the ability to do angled quotes properly.

``Good morning, Dave,'' said HAL.

`Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

Copyright © 2005-2012 Quotation-Marks.com. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.