Hello, I have a question concerning the apostroph mark.
I have found this topic.
I’m doing them by using the shift+# key = '.
Wikipedia says: The apostrophe ( ’ or ’ ) character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets.
But this seems not to be correct as an auto editor edited them? What the right one. This is the one I always use. Using the german keyboard there is no other option at all.
Thank you very much
I’m not totally up on things, but my guess as to why we don’t require the Unicode apostrophe (or other Unicode punctuation, for that matter) is because of the keyboard issues OP was describing.
It’s always puzzled me as to why we don’t use stronger language than “encourage” or “prefer.” I’ve seen editors attempt to use the lack of strong encouragement (or requirement) as justification for replacing Unicode characters with ASCII ones.
Well, we do want to keep the bar for editing low enough not to scare away potential users. I have a keyboard with special characters, but most people do not. It may be a good idea to explicitly forbid changing typographically correct punctuation into plain ones though (unless artist intent overrides it of course, I remember one artist explicitly preferring ... to …).
It may also be a good idea to get rid of the miscellaneous guideline. That is, move the two guidelines in it to their own named guidelines. I don’t know how it works for others, but I always forget to look in there.
Ok thank you very much. I don’t have special characters on my keyboard. So I’ll enter them as I can.
So I just was worried as somebody corrected them. But no problem. Now I know what the reason was.
Here’s a workaround: you can look up all the characters you plan to use (e.g. apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, etc.) on a site like fileformat.info, and paste them into an external text document. From there you can copy and paste the characters as needed. I do this myself.
Thank you very much. But Senax (the editor) wrote me that I can also use Alt Gr and the apostroph (#) to use the english version of it.
’ vs ’ seems to work on my keyboard now.
Thx
To provide more options for anyone coming across this without a German keyboard, the two pages I like as a reference are Jacobbrett and Yurim’s compilations; the former has more characters if all you want is to copy and paste them, while the latter includes the Unicode values if you want to be able to type them from memory.
Someone once provided me with an applet that changes the apostrophes in track titles on a release to the unicode value. It is:
javascript:(function(){$('.track-name').each(function(index,element){$(this).val(this.value.replace(/'/g,"\u2019")).change();})}());
I pasted this into a shortcut and click it whenever I’m editing a track list. Works like a charm.
If I were using a browser that liked running bookmark applets, I’d definitely add that to my bar. Thanks for sharing it, though! Just be careful that everything it changes is actually meant to be an apostrophe/right single quote, and not a left quote or an ʻokina or something.
Just be aware that ' does not always translate to ’. There’s also ‘, ‚, ′, ʻ, etc. which ' is commonly used to represent. In fact, this ambiguity of ' is one of the reasons we prefer the typographically correct Unicode character, as those have far less possible meanings/interpretations (’ still has at least two meanings, but that’s still far less than the 6+ meanings of ').
(Edit: And that’s not even considering that '' is commonly used instead of " to represent all the things that " can possibly represent, overloading ' even more.)
I hear you. I once started down the path of trying to update the applet to apply some logic with respect to when and what to replace. I ended up shelving it because it was starting to get unwieldy.
(Edit: Still, for correcting simple English contractions and such it works pretty well.)
What I do with my search and replace tool, that you could add to your bookmarklet, is to highlight all changed text boxes to then quick review if one of them should be manually fixed (left single quote, prime, etc.)
Great idea! When I have some time, I’ll have a look at your code to see how you’ve done it.
Here is the relevant part.
BTW, by reading this I remember now that it also used to be a bookmarklet. Maybe this link will help you more.
I expect these will be VERY helpful. Thank-you!