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Quotation-Marks.com - Typographical Considerations

Punctuation
The American convention is for sentence punctuation to be included inside the quotation marks, even if the punctuation is not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style is to have the punctuation outside the quotation marks for small quoted phrases:

Someone shouted, ‘Shut up!’. (British)

Someone shouted, “Shut up!” (American)

In American English, commas and periods (full stops) always go inside the quotation marks, single or double, no matter the circumstance:

Also called “plain quotes,” they are teardrops.

Dave asked, “Did HAL say ‘Good morning,’ or did he not?”

Due the influence of computer science, what is essentially if unknowingly the British standard has become more widely accepted in the U.S.:

Also called “plain quotes”, they are teardrops.

Dave asked, “Did HAL say ‘Good morning’, or did he not?”

Despite what is sometimes written on discussions of punctuation, British positioning is the same as American in complete quoted speech:

‘Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration since the symbols did not form a strict sequence. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted string within the quotes. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quote:

Enter the URL as “www.intransitive-verb.com”, the name as “Intransitive-Verb”, and click “OK”.

The URL starts with “www.intransitive-verb.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.

Question marks and exclamation marks must rely on logic to determine whether they go inside or outside:

Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”? (American)

No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?” (American)

No, he said, ‘Where are you, Dave?’. (British)

In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English, whereas in British English, the combination ?”. is acceptable.

Spacing
In English, when a quotation follows other writing on a line of text, a space precedes the opening quotation mark unless the preceding symbol, such as a dash, requires that there be no space. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other punctuation within the sentence, such as a colon or closing punctuation. These exceptions are ignored by some Asian computer systems that systematically display quotation marks with the included spacing.

In Chinese, the spacing is irrelevant since all characters, including punctuation, are the same width.

There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility requires that a (non-breaking) space be inserted.

So Dave actually said, “He said, ‘Good morning?’ ”

Yes, he did say, “He said, ‘Good morning.’ ”

In English, opening quotation marks never appear at the end of a line of text, and closing quotation marks never appear at the beginning. As with most punctuation, these marks are wrapped around with the associated word.

Non-language related usage
Straight quotes (or italic straight quotes) are often used to approximate the prime and double prime (e.g., when signifying inches and feet, or arcminutes and arcseconds). For instance, 5 feet and 6 inches is often written 5’ 6”, and 40 degrees, 20 minutes, and 50 seconds is written 40° 20’ 50”. When available, however, the prime should be used instead (e.g., 5’ 6”, and 40° 20’ 50”). Prime and double prime are not present in most character sets, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 (dec. 8242) and U+2033 (dec. 8243).

Straight single and double quotes are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters. In some languages (e.g. pascal) only one type is allowed, in some (e.g. C and its derivatives) both are used with different meanings and in others (e.g. php and Python) both are used interchangeably. In many languages if it is desired to include inside a string the same quotes used to delimit the string the quotes are doubled. For example to represent the string eat 'hot' dogs in pascal you use 'eat ''hot'' dogs'.

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