[mb-style] Use of ‘fancy’ punctuation characters
Per Starbäck
per.starback at gmail.com
Thu Jun 16 12:07:45 UTC 2011
At least Bogdan Butnaru has planned to write typography assisting
software. See http://musicbrainz-mailing-lists.2986109.n2.nabble.com/Mechanically-assisted-updating-of-typography-on-MusicBrainz-td5978214.html
from early this year.
> song's title → song’s title
> a 'quoted' text → a ‘quoted’ text
> in the '90s → in the ’90s
> rock 'n' roll → rock ’n’ roll
And since actual use often is "erroneous" for apostrophe at the
beginning, with spellings like Rock ‘n’ Roll (I've given examples in
http://musicbrainz-mailing-lists.2986109.n2.nabble.com/Ellipses-quotation-marks-and-the-miscellaneous-guideline-td5734079i20.html#a5769484
) I think a style guide should explicitly mention if that should be
"corrected" (my opinion) or not.
>> The hyphen thing is harder, because AFAIK there's no way
>> to actually see the difference (at least in the standard
>> font MB uses) so they're kinda hard to vote on anyway.
Hopefully these will become autoedits anyway. My preference is that if
you enter titles and names with ambiguous ASCII characters there
should somewhere on the screen appear something like
The character - is ambigous. It is usually a hyphen for hyphenated
words, but sometimes a dash
or a minus sign. If you are unsure just leave it as it is.
[hyphen] [en dash] [em dash] [minus]
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