Know Your Characters

There is a right way and a wrong way to handle these characters:

. . . and the wrong way is very wrong.

Quotation marks and apostrophes

In Beyond The Mac is not a Typewriter Robin Williams wrote: “It is amazing that in 1996 people are still typing straight quotes.” A dozen years later all that has changed is that our amazement has turned to chagrin.

Enclosing words in quotation marks is like holding them in your hands: you have a matched pair of left and right hands that enclose the words. There is no such thing as a hand that is neither left nor right, except maybe in cartoons and on robots. So it is with quotation marks: they are either left or right. No exceptions. None. Ever.

So what do you do with the straight quote key that your Mac keyboard has inherited from its typewriter forebears? You have two choices: either don’t use them and type the correct character instead, or turn on your word processor’s smart quotes feature.

There is no middle ground. The world would be an altogether better place if writers vowed solemnly never in this life to type a straight quote.

If you are still not convinced, you must understand that typing straight quotes is very much like not brushing your teeth. Reading a document with straight quotes in it is like kissing someone who doesn’t brush their teeth. Again quoting Robin Williams: blech!

As far as your Mac is concerned, an apostrophe is a single right quote. By the way, you do know apostrophes denote possession and not plurality, yes? And whenever you see the ‘90’s you cringe because it should be the ’90s, yes?

Pagehand applies some intelligence when fixing quotes. If you type the '90s for example, Pagehand will correctly substitute an apostrophe instead of a left single quote.

One last remark: yes we know one ought not use quote as a noun, but the usage is correct when referring to typographical quotation marks.

Spaces and tabs

You might be surprised to know that hitting the space bar produces only one kind of space. There are other kinds.

Sometimes you might want a particular space to be a little thinner or thicker than an ordinary space. You can use a thin space, en em space (which is as wide as it is tall), or an en space (half as wide as it is tall).

Word processors are free to wrap a line wherever there is a space. Sometimes you need to prevent that. For example, OS X, Mr. Smith, May 7, and Acme Corp. all contain spaces but represent a single term that must not be broken across two lines.

You prevent line breaking by using a non-breaking space, also called hard space, fixed space, or sticky space. In particular, an ellipsis (three periods with space in between) must always be typed with non-breaking spaces. A word of warning, though: non-breaking spaces don’t look right in some fonts (including Hoefler Text, unfortunately).

There’s no good reason to type two spaces in a row. It’s wrong, period. Pagehand can help by ignoring multiple spaces as you type (look at Preferences/Correct & Replace/Disallow multiple spaces).

Pagehand’s Insert menu lets you insert a non-breaking, thin, en, or em space.

If you need to align something, use tabs instead of spaces. While you’re at it, play around with the four tab types to make sure you understand what they do.

Hyphens and dashes

Hyphens join or separate components of a term, en dashes denote ranges, and em dashes denote a break in thought. A hyphen is not an em dash and an em dash is not an en dash and a pair of hyphens is nothing at all.

There are non-breaking hyphens just like non-breaking spaces.

Pagehand’s Insert menu lets you insert a non-breaking hyphen, en dash, em dash, or fraction slash. In Preferences, you can enable a setting to convert two hyphens to an en dash and three hyphens to an em dash.

Accented characters

OK, you’ve got three ways to make accented characters, or diacriticals:

Whenever you do, don’t type an unaccented letter and follow it with a quote. We’ve actually seen a business card with Rene'. Atrocious.

Bullets and ornaments

The trouble with bullets and ornaments is finding them. You might remember that option-8 on a Mac will produce a round bullet, but beyond that you’re pretty much on your own. Just the right ornament might be lurking among the hundreds of characters in the scores of fonts on your Mac.

Pagehand tries to find ornaments for you. It knows where to find the ornaments in Zapf Dingbats, Hoefler Ornaments, Apple Chancery, Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3, Webdings, Type Embellishments One LET, Party LET, Adobe Caslon Pro, and Bodoni Ornaments ITC TT. If you have any of those fonts installed, Pagehand will display their ornaments for you. Just click the Insert menu and choose Ornament...