Curly-quotes (or at least the ones that do left-quote, right-quote anyway) play hell with UTF-8 encoding in HTML - for simplicity's sake I'd rather not deal with them, especially for documents that might (and should be) placed online for everyone to view.
One big problem about curly quotes is that many default Windows fonts have their curly quotes all mixed up – Verdana is one of the offenders – as you can “see here” on HN. I then just refuse to use such shoddy fonts. Not the curly quote’s fault that the font is screwed up. (You can use incorrect UTF-8 characters to get the correct curly quotes when using something like Verdana, but as soon as your text is copied and the font is changed you again end up with the wrong curly quotes.)
Comments
Convert straight quotes to curly quotes
I agree with everything but the above.
Why? Straight quotes are ugly. Someone put much work into designing those curly quotes. Use them.
I too am mystified. Could you explain?
Curly-quotes (or at least the ones that do left-quote, right-quote anyway) play hell with UTF-8 encoding in HTML - for simplicity's sake I'd rather not deal with them, especially for documents that might (and should be) placed online for everyone to view.
Never had that problem.
One big problem about curly quotes is that many default Windows fonts have their curly quotes all mixed up – Verdana is one of the offenders – as you can “see here” on HN. I then just refuse to use such shoddy fonts. Not the curly quote’s fault that the font is screwed up. (You can use incorrect UTF-8 characters to get the correct curly quotes when using something like Verdana, but as soon as your text is copied and the font is changed you again end up with the wrong curly quotes.)