Erica Smith sent the following information through - she sent me a lot of stuff for individual students - but couldn't remember who asked her this - so I'm posting here.
I told one of your students the keyboard commands to get proper 'smart'
quotes and em and en dashes. It's probably worth you putting the
key strokes on a blog entry so they all know them!
Using hyphens instead of space/en-dash/space for punctuation, and using
'non-smart' quote marks is an immediate way to indicate poor design because
it is thoughtless type-setting. It's a nitty-gritty detail, but it will jar on anyone
who knows what you SHOULD be using!
en-dash: "ALT" and the "hyphen" key – use space/en-dash/space for punctuation
Use a proper hyphen to hyphenate words only: half-time etc.
em-dash: "ALT", "SHIFT" and the hyphen key—this is very old-fashioned and/or
american style and is used without extra space, but I don't recommend using it.
Space/en-dash/space is preferable.
Smart quotes...
Open Double Quotes: "ALT" and "Open Square/Squiggly bracket"
Close Double Quotes: "ALT" and "SHIFT" and "Open Square/Squiggly bracket"
Open Single Quotes: "ALT" and "Close Square/Squiggly bracket"
Close Single Quotes/Apostrophe: "ALT" and "SHIFT" and "Close Square/Squiggly bracket"
Not all fonts have proper quote/apostrophe marks on the key to the left of the colon/semi-colon
-- sometimes using this key just gives a clumsy, ugly, vertical line type of quote rather than a
more sculpted looking one.
That was Will, I'll forward this to him.
ReplyDeleteHere's a nice article on the subject, with shortcuts for both Mac and PC.
I'm getting tired of talking to myself here :(