Re: [Groff] Using \(aq in plain English words--bad idea?

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Dave Kemper writes:
> On 4/29/17, Anthony J. Bentley <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both
> > right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section
> > of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6.
> 
> Yes, and that remains a bad decision, because it conflates two
> distinct marks of punctuation that have vastly different semantic
> meanings, disallows automated checking for balanced quotation marks,
> and causes other problems eloquently described in:
> 
> https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-rep
> resent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/

The "balanced" argument doesn't make sense, because there are times
where quotation marks would not be balanced. I'm thinking particularly
of multi-paragraph quotes, which in English typically have an opening
quote mark on each paragraph, but a closing quote mark only on the final.

I disagree with most of the other arguments on that page too. In any
case, it is a compromise made for historical reasons, quite common
throughout Unicode and hardly the most egregious (certainly when
compared to either UTF-16 or Han unification). But, well, I'm going
quite off topic...

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley