On 2017-09-16 01:24:39 +0000, Ken Hart said:

On 09/15/2017 07:53 PM, Chaya Eve wrote:
On Sat, 16 Sep 2017 10:29:05 +1200, Your Name wrote:

Because Usenet (and email) is *meant* to be plain text. "Curly quotes"
(and "curly apostrophes") are not part of plain text, so some usenet
newsreader applications do not work with them, which is the correct
approach. Same goes for other non-plain text typographical characters,
such as long dashes and ellipsis.

Some badly made Usenet newsreader applications do work with "curly
quotes", etc., but they're a pain in the backside in proper Usenet
reader applications since the characters come through as strange
characters.

I didn't know that a "curly quote" is different from a "regular" quote
until Paul's note about PowerPoint automatically substituting "curly
quotes" for regular quotes.

What the heck is the difference between regular and curly to us anyway?
It's a quote for heaven's sake.

What's so horrible about not-curly quotes that PowerPoint has to change
them to "curly" quotes?

Pick up a quality book from your book shelf, and look for a quote. (I
just happened to pick up Rick Meyerowitz's "Drunk Stoned Brilliant
Dead") At the beginning of the quote, the the double quotes have the
dot at the bottom and the curly going up. At the end of the quote, the
dot is at the top, and the curly goes down.

I don't know that this is a constant, but I picked up a second book
(Maroon & Wicker's "The Nixon Years"), and it was the same in that
book. A sample of two in this case is sufficient for me.

Yep, the "curly quote" is the proper way of doing it in publishing and
should be in handwriting. The rule that used to be taught in schools
was something like "66 and 99" around the quote because the start quote
curls up and looks (sort-of) like tyhe number 66 while the end quote
curls down and looks (sort-of) like the number 99.

The straight quote was most likely brought in with the typewriter to
save an extra key and the laziness / speed of the typist only needing
to use one key. That followed through to early computers. These days
most writing and desktop publishing apps will convert straight quotes
to curly quotes (based on whether there's a space before or after
them), although there's usually an option to turn that off if you want.

The apostrophe in words like it's should also be curly (curling
downwards) in proper publishing and there's a corressponding updward
curly apostrophe for when using them as single quote marks.

There are other typographical characters too. The ellipsis, for
example, is usually typed as three fullstops (...) because that's what
the typewriter and computer keyboard has, but in reality it's meant to
be three dots that are closer together and apps like Word will
automaticaly replace three consequetive fullstops with the correct
character. It will also replace a hypen / minus sign used in the middle
of a sentence - like this for example - with a longer hyphen (called
either em dash or en dash, depending on its length).

There are also some character combinations that often replaced by a
single character because it looks better. the word "flood", for
example" may have the f and l characters replaced by a single "fl"
character.