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650 points Stratoscope | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.252s | source
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rsch ◴[] No.43499417[source]
Today in “typesetting before we had typewriters”: …

At least we have dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now. But we still see a lot of "straight" quotes instead of “those smart quotes Microsoft Word likes to generate”. And dashes. Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character? This is often set with slightly more space between dots than ..., and it by definition never wraps across a line between those dots. You still see (C) instead of ©.

It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.

(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)

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1. vanschelven ◴[] No.43507446[source]
for em dashes and ellipsis at least it's trivial to convert before displaying them... which I do in my own markdown-to-publication toolchain (but not here on HN).