[XeTeX] Typographic question : quotation marks and apostrophes

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Dec 2011, at 17:18, Tobias Schoel wrote:

> Hi List,
> 
> On 15.12.2011 17:02, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>> On 15 Dec 2011, at 14:30, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>> 
>>> I know that a number of excellent typographers inhabit this
>>> list, so I would like to pick their brains if I may ?
>>> 
>>> In "Two wide ‘weaver’s windows’, usually found on the ground floor"
>>> (which could equally well be "Two wide ‘weavers’ windows’, usually
>>> found on the ground floor", but I am not the author), the apostrophe
>>> of "weaver’s/weavers’" is the same Unicode character as the closing
>>> quotation mark of "windows’".  Should it be ?
>> 
>> Yes.
> But why? They are semantically different.

Not particularly relevant. The "full stop" or "period" that ends a sentence is semantically different from the "decimal point" that punctuates numbers. That doesn't mean we have separate character codes for them. From a character-encoding point of view, they're the same character; they just happen to have multiple uses.

JK