Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
> 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, because you would have to
> look very hard at the character and the context to see whether the inner
> quotation ends or there is just an apostrophe in it. (BTDT, but YMMV if you
> are a speaker of English as first language.)

I think that's an exaggeration. Except in rare cases where the
apostrophe is at the end of a word it's quite easy to distinguish them
from closing single quotes, which are always at the end of a word or
after a punctuation mark.

>
> Since apostrophes appear to occur quite often in English texts, I have
> therefore decided that in my English texts, ' (the straight apostrophe,
> ' or ') is the appropriate character for all apostrophes as it
> is clearly distinguishable from "the curly one" using the standard fonts
> provided by common UIs. If you want to call that a compromise -- I call
> it an informed design decision in support of usability (that should have
> been made by the Unicode people instead if what you say below is correct).

Like it or not, this isn't a problem that's newly sprung. Even before
computers, this was the convention in printed material (where the ugly
little ASCII apostrophe didn't exist--it was confined to the typewriter
and, later, to computer programming), and it didn't cause massive
difficulties. So there isn't a massive need to "fix" it now with a
mongrelization of two unrelated practices.

> To be proud about that is yet another thing. But what reasonable
> alternative to the aforementioned approach would you suggest instead?

The expected one, the familiar one, the one that's been in use for a
very long time.

>> For other characters, consult the applicable language and style guides
>> (for _human_ languages).
>>
>> Note that ’ _should_ have a curly (curved) glyph but it's similar
>> to a prime (yard symbol) in some fonts. It is explicitly recommended as
>> punctuation apostrophe in the Unicode standard, and the standard also
>> explicitly says that it is the same character as the right single
>> quotation mark.
>
> So it would seen that the standard recommends nonsense,

No, it recommends existing mainstream practice.

> or at least
> something not universally applicable, here.