Typography

[Jarizschmaal]

Hello,

I’ve yet to do the effort to write fiction, but I am interested in typography as I have found that I can create a personally modified keyboard layout with special characters. Reading on Wikipedia and other sources, I find that many of the characters easily available on standard Qwerty keyboards are not as typographically correct as other characters.

A few examples,

“Inward quotes” instead of "vertical quotes."

En-dash surrounded with spaces ( – ), or em dash not surrounded by spaces (—), instead of hyphen surrounded by spaces ( - ).

Even though there is a commonly used keyboard layout that is designed for my mother language, Norwegian, it lacks guillemets («»), which are traditionally more correct in Norwegian than English quotes.

The more typographic apostrophe ’ instead of the typewriter apostrophe ( ' ).

Even though Wikipedia is an excellent source for typography, there are a few questions that I am left unsure of. For instance, it is not clear whether I should place an em space after a period. In Norwegian it is pretty clear that there should only be a normal space after a period, but there appears to be widely different perceptions when it comes to English. I generally follow the Norwegian convention when I write English, but notice many English speaking writers who place several additional spaces after their periods. It also seems to be the default behaviour of LaTeX software to place additional space after periods when processing American English text.

Also, I was puzzled when I read a few posts on this forum. Because from what I hear, if a quotation and a comma or period is written side by side, the quotation mark should always be the last. Like in this example given on grammarbook.com,

“The sign changed from ‘Walk,’ to ‘Don't Walk,’ to ‘Walk’ again within 30 seconds.”

This does however not appear to be the case in a few posts that I read. This leaves me wondering if there has been a change in conventions, as has been the case in Norwegian typography.

I am excited about replies. I will also happily receive any suggestions as to how my writing could be improved or seem less awkward – as I have a hard time seeing it myself.

 

[Culhwch]

Thread moved to AW, as it's not a writing resource as such.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

This does however not appear to be the case in a few posts that I read. This leaves me wondering if there has been a change in conventions, as has been the case in Norwegian typography.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean that you have read posts where the rules are stated differently, or where they are simply ignored?

There are many people here who do not know the rules well enough to follow them. As far as quotation marks go, the conventions have not changed. Other conventions, such as how many spaces to put after a period, are in transition.

 

[chrispenycate]

My main keyboard, Swiss french, QWERTZ, Mac puts guillemets automatically instead of inverted commas in Word, and spaces off colons, semicolons, question and exclamation marks. To get the quotes I want in Word, I need to do an alt 2 (shift alt 2).
However, when I'm on the office PC, alt 2 is @, so it's fortunate the Word therein is an American version.

Around the studio, where I might want to type in stories, are American QWERTY, French french AZERTY and, for a while, a British QWERTY with all the punctuation in different places (yes, I use punctuation – ask anyone here) Mac and PC different on the same (theoretical) standard. No way of knowing if, when I use a special symbol, it's going to come out the same for different people (when I built a website, a number of our artists had names involving accents; é, or à, or even î. I won't even go into the Spanish or Scandinavian symbols I searched for. Then, when the site was running, different computers couldn't link some names.) I get E-mails with gibberish replacements for standard umlauts and punctuation, like« Jâ??ai enregistré une sélection de voix sur le site VPS|ASP.: », which was from another room in the same building. (and I have no idea what you are seeing)

One of the reasons I'm such a slow typer is this problem of the different symbols migrating round the keyboard as I move from computer to computer.

 

[The Judge]

Hello there.

I don't know anything about typography, but I really don't think it's worth worrying about the difference between inward facing and vertical quotes and the different slants on apostrophes. The em dashes may be a trifle more important, but not enough that you should be fixating on them rather than on your actual story and how you write.

As to spaces after a full stop (period), as Teresa mentioned there is no correct model for this -- in fact there was a very heated thread on this very subject not too long ago. As I recall both Teresa and I were on the side of two spaces after a full stop, in her case from long established custom, in mine from aesthetics (it looks nicer!!). Any more than two, though, is a little unusual to say the least.

As to punctuation inside and outside quotations, as Teresa has said, unfortunately the rules are not always understood by those putting work up for critique, but to make matters more complicated American and British English usage varies in any event in certain respects. Again, there has been some discussion of this, which can be found in The Toolbox, a stickied thread at the top of Aspiring Writers. From the use of double quotation marks in the example you quote, I imagine it is an American site. The standard English procedure is to put sentence punctuation outside internal quotes eg 'When you say "Don't do what I do", do you mean me to understand the unspoken "Do what I say"?'

Though in the sentence you quote I personally wouldn't put any internal punctuation! ie

'The sign changed from "Walk" to "Don't Walk" to "Walk" again within 30 seconds.'

I will also happily receive any suggestions as to how my writing could be improved or seem less awkward – as I have a hard time seeing it myself.

Well, judging by what you have written here, your English is very good if not 100% idiomatic. I'm not sure how you can improve except to keep writing and keep reading! But I'm sure we'd be delighted to look at things in more detail if you put some SFF fiction onto the critiques forum as and when you have it ready.

 

[tinkerdan]

Way -back -in -65 -when -I -took -a -typing -class -we -had -a -few -electric; -but -most -typewriters -were -manual -and -that's -what -I -used -at -home. ---I had to pull out some of my old manuscripts to recall how thing looked on paper. And that's how I recalled what this is all about. You see my Smith Corona had mono-spacing which caused all spaces between words to appear huge. So it became the norm to put two spaces at the end of the sentences. That's how they taught us back then and it was a difficult habit to break. But I can tell you that my thumb thanked me fore it, since it was taking a beating.

I tried typing this out with a whole bunch of extra spaces and the forum software edited them out.Bummer.