GoKawiilASCII and Unicode quotation marks
by Markus Kuhn
Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote' ). Your text will otherwise appear rather strange with most modern fonts (e.g., on Windows and Mac systems). Only old X Window System fonts and some old video terminals show ASCII 0x60/0x27 as left and right quotation marks, while most modern systems follow the ISO and Unicode standards instead. If you can use only ASCII’s typewriter characters, then use the apostrophe character (0x27) as both the left and right quotation mark (as in 'quote' ). If you can use Unicode characters, nice directional quotation marks are available in the form of characters U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, and U+201D (as in ‘quote’ or “quote” ).
Background
The Unicode and ISO 10646 standards define the following characters:
U+0022 QUOTATION MARK neutral (vertical), used as opening or closing quotation mark; preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are U+201C and U+201D U+0027 APOSTROPHE neutral (vertical) glyph having mixed usage; preferred character for apostrophe is U+2019; preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks are U+2018 and U+2019 U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
ASCII and ISO 8859 were only designed to support the very restricted typographic style available to typewriter users. The two ASCII characters
0x22 QUOTATION MARK 0x27 APOSTROPHE
are supposed to represent the neutral (vertical) glyphs commonly used on typewriters. They should not be used as directional quotation marks.
ISO 8859 and Unicode fonts are supposed to show the two accent characters
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