Writing is not easy. So is using symbols correctly. As a non-English native speaker, it used to be hard for me to tell, when to use an apostrophe and when to a right quotation mark. Thanks to this article, I know more about typography both in English and Chinese. As follows are a short summary of symbols that are easily misused or hard to type.
Quotation marks and apostrophe
Due to history of keyboard, there are only quotation mark and apostrophe directly pointed out on layout. They are not so obvious to us whose native language are non-Latin symbols, but it matters when we quote in English. Note that quotation mark is different from either left or right double quotation marks as it appears straight instead of cursive.
Single quotation marks
- Left:
‘U+2018 - Right:
’U+2019
Apostrophe
' U+0027
Quotation mark
" U+0022
Double quotation marks
- Left:
“U+201C - Right:
”U+201D
Prime
Used to represent feet, arcminutes and mathematical symbols to differentiate variables.
- Prime:
′U+2032 - Double prime:
″U+2033 - Triple prime:
‴U+2034
Short horizontal lines
The first time that I learned there are actually different short lines in typography was from this podcast.
Hyphen-minus
The one locates right between number `0` and `+`.
- U+002D
Dash
- En dash:
–U+2013 - Em dash:
—U+2014
Dots
This part matters more to writing in Chinese as a middle dot (间隔号) is inserted between first and last names of non-CJK names and horizontal ellipsis(省略号) shows up more frequently than in English1.
Middle dots
· U+00B7
Horizontal ellipsis
…… U+2026
Mid-line horizontal ellipsis
⋯ U+22EF
Bullet
• U+2022
Black circle
● U+20CF
Accents
Grave accent
` U+0060
Acute accent
´ U+00B4 2