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It Started Curved
The apostrophe first appeared in the printed universe in Italy, 16th century, as a curved shape to signify elision copied from handwritten classical Italian poetry. The apostrophe was equivalent to our "Gotchas" or "Wannas" in the sense that it was a way to take the stiffness of the text away by making it sound more human-like.
Here is an ...
33
It's a feature of that particular font design. There is no distinction between a horizontal and slanted hyphen. Some fonts such as Adobe Garamond, Monotype Goudy, Goudy Old Style (URW), have a slanted hyphen, but the vast majority of serif fonts don't. Some also have a hyphen that looks more like a tilde, but again this is just a design choice.
The reason ...
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You can often just omit the rows entirely If you take a look at the viral gif sequence (below) you can see that the repetitions are just omitted and it makes a significant visual improvement to the table (for more on the subject read Edward Tufte).
As alternatives you can use the double qutation mark or a -"- (maybe —
" —) symbol instead. You ...
28
Did a bit of research to make sure, but in general "proper" typography doesn't use straight quotes, single or double. Here's a handy guide for the commands and HTML entities for single/double curly quotes.
Typewriters are also responsible for the introduction of ‘straight
quotes’, non-specific quote marks designed as a space-saving measure
for the ...
19
You're looking for the ditto mark. There's a character specifically for this, U+3003 〃 in the Unicode CJK Symbols and Punctuation block, and you could also use a double prime, U+2033 ″ from the General Punctuation block, which should always look similar.
I don't recall ever seeing a quotation mark U+0022 " used for this except with typewriter or sans-serif ...
17
The Unicode Standard comments on U+2019 (’):
this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe
As far as what is right encoding-wise, I cannot think of a higher authority.
Also, the typographical conventions of most languages do not use U+2019 for other purposes or only as secondary quotation marks. In fact, British English is the only major ...
15
If you want a minus sign, use a minus sign.
That's what it's for, after all.
That being said—unless you are writing for a mathematical publication or in a similar context it probably won't go noticed if you do use a hyphen or dash. I know I have used a hyphen-minus or en-dash countless times in the past.
As you mentioned in your question, there is no key ...
11
Unicode Characters are chosen by those that are submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee. Usually the submissions are characters that are already being used.
Most of the cat characters that exist now were emoji characters, used by many japanese phone carriers before being included in unicode. These emoji are very focused on japanese culture, including ...
11
In English a double quotation mark is often used as the symbol for ditto. I haven't seen two commas used for this. As far as I know, it should be the double quotation mark in English. Not sure about other languages however. I can only answer for British English (I'm from the UK).
Ditto:
the aforesaid; the above; the same (used in
accounts, lists,...
10
This is a katakana mu. Katakana is one of three Japanese scripts in use. It is used for loanwords, to convey a similar feel to ALL CAPS, or for onomatopoeia.
Wikipedia article on the mu in both katakana and hiragana.
9
First, some history.
Curly quotes and apostrophes were the original style. They are also called Printer's quotes and apostrophes.
Straight quotes and apostrophes came along with the typewriter. The typewriter being a mechanical device with limitations decided that it made more sense to use one set of straight marks instead of two separate sets of curly ...
8
All the images seem to come from the same source mostly GearedBull (Jim Hood) user on Wikipedia. It is a type specimen although quite smalll compared to standard specimens. To me, it just looks like someone took the time to make these images for Wikipedia.
I doubt you could easily edit the file since the font is probably in outlines but you can gather some ...
8
Unicode superscripts one, two and three […] are […] the same "height". Unicode superscripts four and five […] are […] the same "height" but said height seems to be different from the heights of Unicode superscript one, two and three.
Unicode is about encoding characters not about their detailed shape. For example, the Unicode character U+0067 (Latin Small ...
7
The following is very general (the last point will explain why), but mostly based on my experience with creating several special characters (most of languages I do not speak) for a blackletter font:
Search the Internet for design instructions from somebody from the community that uses a character, e.g., speakers of the languages that uses it. For letters, I ...
7
If it's staying on your PC, MS's Symbol and Wingdings fonts provide some good choices.
If you want something a little more modern with a nice set of icons and a really permissive license, why not use Font Awesome? There are some other icon sets out there - Glyphicons and Entypo come to mind, that were made for the screen but, depending on the icon and your ...
6
As plainclothes has said, the dash is composed of several em-dashes. One might call it a long dash...
Dickinson is best known for writing brief poems, often untitled, consisting of short lines peppered with long dashes, which mark her out as a more modern voice among her contemporary 19th-century poets. [Daily Telegraph]
...or perhaps an anonymisation ...
5
Are there any official sources that describe how symbols and characters should be designed? And more generally—How do I approach designing characters I am unfamiliar with?
A well-know source for Latin characters is http://diacritics.typo.cz
For Islandic characters see also http://font.is/letur-the-making-of-thorn-thorn-eth-eth/
In general, as you already ...
5
There is one item that all the answers so far have not mentioned. On a command line interface or in a programming language, the apostrophe (UTF-8 character 27) is the only valid choice.
The use of U+2019 with cause syntax errors when you do a cut and paste. With the automatic translation of the character 27 to U+2019, it now means that copying command ...
5
Historical reasons only – plus a side dish of "backward compatibility".
The original PC keyboards were very much 'typewriter-like'. Also, in the original ASCII set there were no 'fullwidth plus', 'minus', and 'multiply' symbols. The common MS-DOS 'extended ASCII' set contained a proper 'divide' – but only in certain codepages. (Only a guess, but it can be ...
5
could also be achieved by appropriate kerning instead?
Typesetting conventions have been developed for over 500 years of letterpress printing. Using one character instead of manually kerning 3 metal characters each time an ellipses was used made a lot of sense. It was simply practical and also the most simple way to achieve a consistent and visually ...
5
A Distinct Semantic Meaning
The ellipsis (…) is a punctuation mark. It is as distinct as any other punctuation mark and, as does any other punctuation mark, has its own meaning and uses. An ellipsis is not three periods. It looks like three periods and is more often than not, written as three periods—but it is not three periods.
Depending on the context it ...
5
Based on an answer in this thread, this minus sign was used in bookkeeping, because the - was already in use.
After all the amounts were put in, they were checked twice. When the amount was correct, one would mark it by putting a little horizontal bar behind it. The bar meant the amount was correct.
Since the usual minus sign could be confusing and ...
5
Many modern fonts to address this problem. Take Adobe's Source Sans Pro and the example they give:
This shows you how people will differentiate the characters (1, I, and l) that tend to be confused. Just before that image in the article, the author noted:
For usages where this level of distinction is not required, there is an alternate, simple lowercase ...
4
There's no specific term other than "type specimen" which is simply some sort of design to show off the design of your typeface.
Historically, back when fonts where physical things made out of wood or lead, you'd receive a catalog from the type foundry with their fonts displayed in the book in various ways, though typically in the form of short sentences or ...
4
I did not know about it before, but after some good research, it seems like it is just an quicker/cursive based variant of the division sign in some old german books. These are just speculations based on one of the Unicode.com mailing list discussions, the mails are pretty interesting so I'd invite you to take a look to this e-mail and the 5 next answers, it ...
4
You can use decimal or hexadecimal values such as below.
Make you your meta charset is correctly set (UTF-8 should do I guess)
Decimal: ₹
Hexadecimal: ₹
CSS code: \20B9
More information and example usage on this page.
3
I work in a research centre and we commonly use fairly large French and German corpora (fairly recent ones). In the French corpus the straight apostrophe ' appears at about 4 times the amount of the curly apostrophe ’. In the German one the straight one ' is non existant and only the curly ’ can be found.
The variation in the French corpus could actually be ...
3
Here is one reasoning I have read for the use of open em dashes (with spaces) instead of closed ones (without spaces). Some fonts have a very narrow em dash. The em dash was supposed to be used closed because it is was large enough to create a visual break. Very narrow em dashes fail in this case. If you are merely providing text without marrying it to a ...
3
You are looking for illustrators. Specifically, character designers.
Find one you like (based on their portfolio, affordability, etc) and then they'll sit down with you and ask you the questions they need to ask to do their job.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
