Tim Bray:
If you are publishing text for people to read and you want it to look even halfway professional, you absolutely must use real actual left and right quotation marks: “quotes” not "quotes". Also right-single apostrophe: as in don’t use “don't”.
I absolutely agree and have been striving to only use proper typographic punctuation for quite some time now. For this site, my Smartdown plugin automatically turns straight quotes and apostrophes into their proper typographic counterparts, but I really don’t need it anymore, I have taught myself the keyboard shortcuts, and it is becoming more and more natural to me. And this is where I disagree with Tim Bray. He recommends reprogramming keys, and I am recommending what I am doing, which is learning the actual keyboard commands. This means no matter what computer (well Mac at least) I am using, I can type curly quotes and apostrophes without any fuss.
The key combos are:
- Option + [ = Left double quote
- Option + Shift [ = Right double quote
- Option + Shift + ] = Apostrophe