curly quotes
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curly quotes are pairs of quote marks that are shaped with curves to indicate the start and end of a quotation, like “ ” and ‘ ’ , and should be used in prose content and posts.
Why
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You should use curly quotes in prose content for improved typography and better readability around quotations and as apostrophes in contractions and possessives.
How to
Different systems have different ways of entering curly quotes. You may find the following useful for copy/pasting:
“ ” ‘ ’
How to type
On MacOS, you can type curly quotes as follows:
- “ — option-[
- ” — shift-option-[
- ‘ — option-]
- ’ — shift-option-]
On browsers in general, you can create the following bookmarklets (curlypastelets or just pastelets) to choose and type the curly quotes you want:
IndieWeb Examples
Jeremy Cherfas uses a home-made Python script in Alfred to smartify quotes and em dashes when he writes
Tantek Çelik uses UTF-8 in his content creation and publishing flow (from using BBEdit to create posts and UTF-8 plain text files, to PHP and JS handling of UTF-8 storage, to publishing HTML with UTF-8), and thus enters curly quotes directly when typing his content on MacOS laptop keyboard (as documented in #How_to_type, which then make it all the way through being presented in the reader’s browser in HTML served as UTF-8. E.g.:
- 2024-06-28 Responsible Inventing (earlier examples available)
gRegor Morrill: 2024-07-02 my note with the four bookmarklets I use- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
References
Books and other notable references about smart quotes and usage thereof:
- : 6.115: “Smart” quotation marks
- Calls the quotation marks “directional” and gives the alternative names “smart”, “typographer’s”, and “curly”.
- States that using the “unidirectional” (ie. non-curly) quotation mark “signals a lack of typographical sophistication”.
- : Straight and curly quotes (archived) from Practical Typography:
Compared to straight quotes, curly quotes are more legible on the page and match the other characters better. Therefore, straight quotes should never, ever appear in your documents.
- Documents how to write the different symbols on both Windows and macOS.
- Describes how to turn on automatic smart-quote substitution in word processing software.
Brainstorming
- ...
Tools
Tools folks have found or suggested but no actual known IndieWeb usage thereof — try them out and see if they work for you and if so add it to your description in the IndieWeb Examples section.
- : SmartyPants (archived), Perl script fot automatically replacing straight quotes with curly ones (and some other typography replacements). Initially released in 2002 and updated through 2004.
- Ports for other languages exist, like PHP SmartyPants (archived).
- Made specifically to work in combination with Markdown.