Look at this article: link. Ignoring the actual content for now, one thing struck me. The AWFUL typography.
There’s this obsession in some circles that using double grave accents (`), in the place of quotation marks (") is OK. I think it stems from the fact that we’re taught that when using quotation marks, they are like little versions of ‘66′ and ‘99′ - or at least I was.
That’s fine if you’re hand-writing something, but on a computer screen it just looks wrong. The ’standard’ quotation marks are just two simple lines, and some people don’t see this as being correct.
Some software, such as Microsoft Word, will automatically convert them to look like the more typographically correct versions. Other software, on the other hand, won’t, so they work around this by manually entering the double grace accents, and to close, double apostrophes. Without any proper kerning, it just looks silly. Consider the following sentence:
“Oh dear, I appear to have broken it.”
"Oh dear, I appear to have broken it."
As far as the typography goes, the latter is correct. The spacing is correct, and it looks cleaner. On a PC screen, it doesn’t matter much if those quotation marks are any particular shape, as they appear to be roughly three or four simple pixels in a line. It’s patently obvious what it is.
Here’s a screenshot of some quotes in Word 2007:
You can see it has done what I said it would do - converted the quotes to a more typographically-correct version. This is with the two most popular fonts, Times New Roman and Arial.
So what’s the point of this rant? Well, it’s the fact that some people don’t appreciate good punctuation. I know I make mistakes, but I try to weed them out and do things right. Others just don’t know the difference in the first place, or they do, but they’re trying to prove something by fighting things.
