How can we get this fixed? It’s driving me nuts. My three or four emails...

Well, you could try just emailing Steven Heller directly; his email address is on his web site. But if you keep emailing people at the times they’ll eventually decide you’re a nutter.

How much of an issue should this generally be?

Given that only anal retentive designers care, and the general public is essentially ignorant of the issue and quite happy to use tick marks instead, it really shouldn’t be much of an issue. What we really need to do is get a competent US government willing to throw out the English measurements so those stupid inch and foot marks can come off of keyboards altogether.

Sounds like a job for Stephen Heller.

don’t puzzle over those puzzles :)

Start mailing them suspiciously wrapped letters stating your demands that they fix that egregious error. Also include a bit of white powder. That should get their attention.

The public advocate seems singularly useless to me. Just a bit of navel contemplating. You could also try the crossword editor.

Yeah, I agree that this is not such a big deal that I’m going to spend much time to try to fix it. I’ll come off as a nutball. But it seems as relevant as a small grammatical error - and The New York Times should be getting it right, especially if it’s something that’s there every day.

However, on your point, jpad that “Given that only anal retentive designers care, and the general public is essentially ignorant of the issue” - would you extend that to other aspects of typography such as kerning and ragging?

What we really need to do is get a competent US government willing to throw out the English measurements

They also represent degrees and minutes of arc in the SI.

The problem is that the keyboard was designed by computer engineers, not typographers. So there are the ASCII tilde and circumflex included, that very few people ever need, and not separate left and right quotes, which everybody needs all the time. And why no multiply sign?

Perhaps one could argue that the internet, in all its ASCII glory as made the tick mark an acceptable alternative to curly quotes?

“Perhaps one could argue that the internet, in all its ASCII glory as made the tick mark an acceptable alternative to curly quotes?”

One could, but he will often get shot down by cranky older designers who used to set those quotes by hand on letterpress. But I think that as time goes by, unless the typographer’s quotes and apostrophes replace tick marks on keyboards, we will see a shift to tick marks used everywhere when young designers who either don’t know or don’t care start taking over.

>The problem is that the keyboard was designed by computer engineers, not typographers.

Hmm, I think they copied the typewriter keyboard so I don’t think they can be blamed for the original idea of reducing character sets. And Apple could have added them - the fact they didn’t casts doubts on Jobs typographic credentials, no?

“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

... but you know, key caps were expensive back then, so although it was the first computer with beautiful typography, we put the true quotes and ligs on some obscure shift state of the other random characters - sorry. ;-)

Well, at least now we know who to blame ;b

Where did that bit you quoted come from? I’d like to read the entire original.

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=steve+jobs+typography

to.. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1422863/posts

Cheers, Si

I have a couple of curmudgeonly comments to mutter into my grey beard.

First, it is a fact of life that this crappy unisex tick mark has crept into our lives everywhere. Envision, please, a shiny brass sign in a hotel lobby, announcing the presence of a restaurant called Maude’s: it’s nicely buffed by the staff every week, and has engraved letters filled with scarlet enamel. The word is set in Mistral, letterspaced (which means the joins don’t line up), and the apostrophe is the dreaded vertical tick. We’ve all seen it . . .

That doesn’t mean we should not take every opportunity to teach people the difference. Many times they are grateful for it. I would say more often they are grateful than the times when they look at me as if I’m from Mars.

What I lament the most about the loss of the true double and single quotes is that it represents a loss of utility in addition to lost style. In complex dialogue set with those traditional quotes, you have a reasonable idea of what’s going in. If you lose them to unisex tick marks, then there is no indication of polarity (if that’s a fair term to use). It makes the parsing of the story much more difficult! So the traditional quotes actually serve a genuine orientational purpose, a useful function.

As for the circumflex mentioned in an earlier post: I agree that it and the tilde are not much used in English typography! However, this calls to mind a very discouraging story from France several decades ago. The French tax authority bought new software for their mainframe computers, some monster new souped-up program from a developer in Houston or Dallas, who’d never even seen a circumflex. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people had their names altered. Families that had been spelling their surnames as Forêt suddenly became Foret, which, let’s face it, ain’t exactly the same thing. A sad outcome, especially because it didn’t have to be that way. One culture not appreciating the subtleties of another.

I take every chance I get to tell people about real apostrophes and quote marks and I explain how to make them (and, par contre, I point out how vigilant they should be that their inch and foot marks in dimensions don’t get interpreted by design software as curly quotes). Show them the color of true small caps and they’ll immediately see the difference between them and machine-generated small caps. I bet a lot of you do the same thing.

We are the bridge people, as Steve Harvard used to say. We know the difference and it is VITAL that we pass on the values from the old world to as many people as we can, even as the rest of the world sinks into a morass. It’s still worth doing, in my view. Spread the word, one person at a time.

NS:
And why no multiply sign?

Of course engineers need to multiply, they just use * and () rather than something like an x.

The standard qwerty keyboard was not designed by computer engineers. If it were, the zero would be to the left of the one instead of to the right of the nine.

I’m aware of one such keyboard, the SAIL keyboard. You can see a picture of it here:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/1-7.htm

Now that was a keyboard designed by computer engineers.

s’marks

Thanks jpad and Nick for your suggestions. I made a little headway with your advice (I contacted the venerable SH and he was kind enough to pass the word along to the Times). But that was several days ago and that pesky tick is still at it — as it has been for over a year.

It’s a tiny, tiny matter, I know, but I have to side with Bruce on this. I think we should celebrate our roles as guardians of visual language. This is language after all — the magic marks of Beatrice Warde — and if we’re going to take such pains over the shapes of serifs and the design of letters then we shoud take responsibility for how visual language is used.