Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:54:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Quote marks
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

There's been a discussion in rasff (the rec.arts.sf.fandom newsgroup)
recently about quote marks.  On typewriters, and, in my experience, on
computers, there's only one kind of double quote.  It's character 34
in the ASCII code, it looks like this: " and it's used not just for
quotations but also as an abbreviation for inches, and for seconds of
arc.  It's also used in HTML tags, and in various computer languages.

In books and magazines, on the other hand, there are two kinds of
double quote marks -- an opening quote mark and a closing quote mark.
They usually curve differently.

The claim was recently made in rasff that fanzines that don't use
separate opening and closing quote marks are "crudzines," not worth
reading.

This is not something I tend to notice, but apparently it's important
to some people.

So I did some research.

The oldest book I have -- from 1860 -- uses separate opening and
closing quote marks.  So does the newest book, printed this month.
So do all but one of the many books I've checked, and all of the
professionally printed magazines I checked.

How about fanzines?

Ansible does.  Mimosa did.  Das Fangold does not.

How about the WSFA Journal?

Sam Lubell's WSFA Journals did.  But none of the previous editors'
WSFA Journals did.  The two issues I've published so far do not.

ASCII is missing these codes.  Microsoft's proprietary incompatible
"extension" of ASCII has them, but looks like utter garbage to anyone
not running Microsoft software, so that's no good.  Fortunately, it
appears that HTML has them, which is what's important, since web pages
are in HTML.  (Unlike Sam, I create each issue as a web page, and
print it from that.)

To lynx users like me, they display as regular ASCII quotes.  Do they
look like the right thing to users of Netscape, Internet Explorer,
Mozilla, Opera, Mosaic, and Konqueror?

If you're using one of these browsers -- or one I haven't mentioned
-- please look at the minutes of the last two meetings, at
http://www.wsfa.org/minutes.htm.  I just replaced the HTML codes for
the plain old ASCII quotes with the HTML codes for the fancy quotes
marks in it.

If everyone agrees that it looks better, or at least that it looks no
worse, I will produce subsequent WSFA Journals using fancy quotes.  I
will also replace ordinary quotes with fancy quotes whenever I happen
to update a web page on our site for any other reason.  (I won't
bother to edit a page just to replace them.)  I will continue to use
the plain quote marks in the old pre-Lubell WSFA Journals, since
that's what they used.  If Sam would like, I will replace all the
plain quotes with fancy quotes in all 92 of his issues, since he used
fancy quotes in all 92 issues (or at least the several I checked,
including his first and last issues).

I don't plan to update my July and August issues online, since the
hardcopy versions didn't use the fancy quotes, and I'd prefer to keep
the online and hardcopy versions as nearly identical as possible.

(None of the above has anything to do with *single* quotes.  ASCII
has always had two kinds of those: characters 96 and 39, which look
like ` and '.)