Can I quote you on that? “ No â€

People are getting sloppy about their quotations online. No I don’t mean bad reporting, I mean bad typography. Smart quotes gone awry.

I’ve seen on websites, blogs, and newsletters, an increasing amount of weird characters. Characters where quotation marks or other punctuation should be.

The culprit seems to be cutting-and-pasting from Word or other Office programs. Word creates ‘smart quotes’ that automatically adjust to whether they are on the right or left of a word to form the proper look. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with these for years, as it looks professional until you are using the smart-quote to indicate feet or inches, which should look just like they key on your keyboard shows.

What I didn’t realize is that Word is substituting its own font-characters for the smart quotes, which isn’t web-standard. So we end up with a ‘lost in translation’ problem, like sending the same text repeatedly thru a translation tool.

Examples of how quote marks can render:

• Bad: cut-n-paste from a webpage with smart quotes: “Noâ€
• Ugly: Type directly into Blogger: “No”
• Beautiful: Hand-coded into Blogger: “No”

Now, I’m not exactly sure of what programs do what to quote-marks. I’m sure it differs as to where you are copying from and where you are pasting to. Other places you might have to hand-code the characters. Be aware, and adjust accordingly. In my case, My new website’s CMS seems to render from hash-marks to smart-quotes automatically, but pasted smart-quotes get ugly.

Here are a couple articles on the subject:

The trouble with Em ‘n En @ A List Apart
Smart Quotes @ Wikipedia