On 2008-04-14, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> Scripsit Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn:
>
>> I think you would agree that it would make especially English text
>> with quotations in direct speech (say, in a novel where one person
>> tells another what a third said) quite badly legible if somewhere
>> there is an apostrophe represented by ’ in the inner quotation,
>
> No I wouldn't. Such usage is _standard_ English, to the extent anything
> is standard in English. Consult the applicable style guide and then the
> Unicode Standard, which identifies the punctuation marks at the level of
> coded characters.
>
>> Since apostrophes appear to occur quite often in English texts, I have
>> therefore decided that in my English texts, ' (the straight
>> apostrophe, &apos; or ') is the appropriate character for all
>> apostrophes
>
> That's computerize or typewriterese - abhorred, disliked, and frowned
> upon by typographers and grammars.

Style guides and grammar books just tell you when to use apostrophes.
They don't say anything about whether you should use U+0027 or U+2019 to
represent them.

PointedEars is right that using U+2019 to write an apostrophe is
obviously illogical, although I don't agree that it causes any real
ambiguity or legibility problems for human readers.

But do you know _why_ the Unicode Standard recommends using U+2019?

U+0027 is called the "apostrophe" but then the description says "neutral
(vertical) glyph with mixed usage" (whatever that's supposed to mean-- I
thought we were talking about a character not a glyph) and then goes on
about how the wonderful U+2019 is preferred for practically everything.

Typographers may be right that a curlier glyph looks better, but then why
not just map the curlier glyph to both U+2019 and U+0027 in the font?

I don't understand the case against U+0027.