[XeTeX] Typographic question : quotation marks and apostrophes

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Peter Baker wrote:
> apostophe and the closing quotation mark are the same glyph. We'd have to kern
> each instance manually.
>
> That said, it's pretty clear that we're stuck with what the Unicode Consortium
> has decreed for us.

Old style and lining numerals are generally the same character codes as
each other too, and we manage.  I don't think that the fact of apostrophe
and closing single quotation mark using the same code point is really a
big obstacle to typographic effects that we might want to apply to them.
A lot could be done with OpenType contextual substitution, though it might
be better to use manually-selected alternates to convey the author's
intention rather than guessing automatically.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/