MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 excerpt †ĥe $wėe‡ §Θunđ ¤f ¶un¢†u@t!on INDESIGN MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 1 †ĥe $wėe‡ §Θunđ ¤f ¶un¢†u@t!on While punctuation gives text rhythm, some beats are more familiar than others. By Yves Peters ONTS ARE MUCH MORE THAN MERELY LETTERS AND NUMBERS. Scroll down the glyph menu, and you’ll discover an eclectic assort- F ment of signs and symbols, punctuation, and more—some familiar, some rather obscure. When playing music the symbols above and between the notes are as important as the notes themselves. Similarly, in typesetting punctuation helps make sense of the words around them. They command the rhythm of the text; tell the reader when to pause, and for how long. They have the power to make the words ask, or shout, or hesitate; they determine what the characters before or after them exactly mean; they alter how letters or words sound. Time to get (re)acquainted with this symphony of glyphs, from the common to the unusual. INDESIGN MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 excerpt SUBSCRIBE NOW 2 Quotation Marks ( ’ ’, “ “ ) preferred in the United States. Most impor- Because it must tantly, you should always match opening be one of the most and closing quotation marks. When quot- Set in FF Suhmo frequently recur- ing within a quotation, alternate single and ring topics in arti- double quotation marks. Although you can Apostrophe ( ’ ) cles on typogra- enter quotation marks with dedicated key However, this phy, it’s only fair combinations, these days most applica- automatic con- to start with quo- tions—especially text editors and desktop version can pro- tation marks. A publishing software—automatically con- duce unwanted telltale sign of vert straight or “dumb“ quotes into curly or results. If a space unprofessional “desktop typography“ is “smart“ quotes during text entry. precedes the quotation mark, it converts to the use of straight quotes. These straight In InDesign, this control is called Use the opening variant. Conversely, if a charac- variants stem from the days of typewriters, Typographer’s Quotes and lives in the Type ter precedes the quotation mark, it converts whose keyboard didn’t provide sufficient pane of the Preferences dialog box. You can to the closing variant. The shape of the apos- room for separate opening and closing enable or disable this preference at any time trophe—though it has a different purpose— quotation marks. by pressing Command-Option-Shift-quote (or should be identical to the closing single As their name implies, quotation marks Ctrl-Alt-Shift-quote in Windows). quotation mark. The presence of a space enclose a quotation or direct speech, but before abbreviated years like ’11 for 2011 also a literal title or a name. Another com- incorrectly produces an opening single quo- mon use of quotation marks is to indicate tation mark, and is a very common typo- ironic or apologetic words, and to signal graphical mistake. To produce the correct unusual usage of specific words.Y ou can Set in FF Amman apostrophe in this situation, press Option/ use single and double quotes; the latter are Alt-Shift-]. INDESIGN MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 excerpt SUBSCRIBE NOW 3 Tracking Down Obscure Glyphs To enter some of the more obscure glyphs in your InDesign The function of the apostrophe is the designer use them for this purpose. However document, you can’t simply tap a omission of one or more letters; for example, this type of use is improper, and looks plain single key. You may even have to in contractions like “don’t“ and “isn’t“, or the wrong to Spanish and other nationalities that use a particular font. For instruc- marking of possessive case, as in Charlie’s use guillemets for quotation. tions, see the article “Your Guide Angels. (I think I just betrayed my age here.) Note that InDesign automatically replaces to Obscure Glyphs“ on page 27. Sometimes you can see a single prime or regular quotation marks with guillemets when ] an acute accent used inappropriately for an your text is set to one of these languages in [ apostrophe, especially in e-mails or online. the Control panel or Character panel. It won’t mathematics, the sciences, and linguistics. change quotes already there, but it will con- Because prime symbols are in only a minor- Guillemets ( ’ ’, “ “ ) vert them as you type or copy/paste. ity of the fonts, it’s acceptable to use Quotation marks straight quotes instead. are language-spe- Prime ( ′, ″, ‴ ) cific.T hey have a Very few people Degree ( ° ) variety of forms in realize the The degree sym- different languages prime symbols bol serves, and in different are different among other media. The other from the things, to repre- primary shapes are straight quotes, and should not be confused sent degrees of the guillemets, with the apostrophe, quotation marks, or arc (e.g., in geometry and geographic coordi- which are used in Latin languages like the acute accent or grave accent. Primes nate systems) or degrees of temperature. Its French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, designate several different units—including first recorded modern use in mathematics is among others. Because their shape reminds feet, arcminutes, minutes, seconds—and from 1569 where the usage clearly shows that us of arrows, these days many a web are also used for various other purposes in the symbol is a small raised zero, to match the INDESIGN MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 excerpt SUBSCRIBE NOW 4 symbols for minute, second, third; i.e. prime ′, complement of lowercase characters in Number Sign/Pound/Hash ( # ) double prime ″, and triple prime ‴. superscript, almost all fonts include the ordi- In US English the In some languages the degree sign also nal º and ª in their character set. In Italian, number sign # is indicates the date of birth; for example, Yves Portuguese, and Spanish, they are appended frequently used Peters (°1969). (See also the dagger.) However, to the numeral depending on whether the instead of the № don’t confuse the degree symbol with the number’s grammatical gender is masculine sign. Usually ordinal º, which also looks like a raised circle. or feminine, respectively. They are some- called the pound sign in the United States, The difference is subtle yet important—the times underlined as well. the symbol is called the hash in most degree symbol is almost always a perfectly English-speaking countries outside North round circle, whereas the ordinal º is con- Numero Sign ( № ) America. To differentiate it from the sharp in structed like a lowercase “o“. To type a degree Besides the ordi- musical notation, the two horizontal lines in character, press Option/Alt-8. nal º and ª, some the number sign must be truly horizontal, typefaces also whereas they’re slanted to the upper right in Ordinal Indicator ( º, ª ) offer the numero the sharp sign. Ordinal numbers symbol—a com- Recently, the hash has acquired an indicate order, such bination of the capital N with the masculine entirely new function thanks to the social as 1st and 2nd. In ordinal º, often underlined. This typographic networking and microblogging service some languages, abbreviation of the word “number“ indicates Twitter. By adding a word or group of words ordinals are indi- ordinal numeration, especially in addresses, with no spacing preceded by a hash to a cated with a single names, and titles. If the font you’re using post, users can group posts together by character: o or a. doesn’t have this glyph, in English it’s topic or type; for instance, #InDesign. These Although few type- acceptable to substitute it with the abbrevia- are called hashtags. faces have a full tion “No.“ including the full stop at the end. INDESIGN MAGAZINE 41 April | May 2011 excerpt SUBSCRIBE NOW 5 Bullet ( • ) Interpunct ( · ) Vertical Bar, Pipe ( | ) Despite the Not many peo- Another symbol aggressive con- ple realize this, that can be used notations its but the use of as an alternative name may sug- spaces to sepa- divider mark in gest, the typo- rate words only general typogra- graphic bullet is completely harmless. All it originated somewhere between 600 and 800 phy is the vertical bar. The character has various does is indicate items in a list. The name most A.D. In ancient Greek all the letters in a text applications in mathematics and programming. likely originated from its original shape that simply ran into each other, and it was up to It is not to be confused with the broken bar ( ¦ ), resembles an actual bullet. Bullets often the reader to distinguish the individual words. which, however, doesn’t have any clearly iden- appear in the dreaded MS PowerPoint pres- Interpuncts, the first punctuation marks, were tified uses distinct from the vertical bar. entations as bulleted items, also called “bullet regularly used in Latin to separate words. points“. Text editors and desktop publishing They can still be seen in architectural lettering Asterisk ( * ) applications offer them in a wide variety of and inscriptions, where they sometimes Fans of classic shapes and colors. As the original round bul- assume the shape of a small triangle. Belgian comics let looks quite large and unwieldy in most Most dictionaries use the interpunct to are more likely to fonts, designers often substitute another indicate the syllables in words. Because its mispronounce symbol, such as a hyphen, an asterisk, or size and weight perfectly harmonizes with this “Asterix.“ The an interpunct. the stem weight of the typeface and its punc- Greek/late Latin roots of its name are derived tuation, the interpunct is sometimes used by from its appearance: the asterisk resembles typographers as a general divider; for exam- the conventional representation of a star.