Re: tick and backtick in unicode

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

[Alan Shutko]

> Perhaps you should speak to the XFree86 people, then.  They recently
> "fixed" the standard X fonts to make ` and ' assymetrical.

Maybe! :-)

I take your sentence as a figure of style, and hope you do not really imply
that I'm responsible, alone, to save the Earth!  I tried a few times already,
and it quickly gets very exhausting. :-)

Better each of us do our share.  My little contribution, in this particular
case, is to spread the word that some common sense is needed about fonts.
ASCII has not been recently re-invented, just because Unicode gets in the
picture, or because people feel that acute accent over apostrophe ambiguity,
which is indeed part of ASCII, lasted long enough.  Unicode is, by design,
coincident with ASCII for the first code points, and people pushing for
Unicode should remember this, in all simplicity.  Let them select some
proper Unicode apostrophe, outside ASCII, if they want it clear cut,
non ambiguous, and vertical.

I know that many people, and even very competent ones, are throwing of
confusion in this field, trying to "repair" ASCII.  This is unfortunate.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard