The answer to the first question is that parentheses are usually designed to fit well primarily with lowercase characters and/or mixed case characters. I suppose all caps with parentheses is less called for as a rule.

The answer to the second question is that computer character sets are descended from those used by teletype terminals which were in turn descended from typewriters. To keep the number of keys to a minimum, the straight quote mark was invented for typewriters. True typographic quote marks were added to computer character sets later when computers were adapted to set type.

to a beginning typophile like myself, they are a bit, ahem, dry reading

hmmm... maybe i'm just weird, but i loved reading Elements. I need to read it again...

Most punctuation is designed to work best with the lowercase. One of the great features of OpenType is that if you set something in an all-caps setting, OT savvy programs can adjust the punctuation accordingly on the fly. nifty eh?
In the same respect, most typesetting applications do the same thing with quotemarks - automaticaly replacing (in most cases) the appropriate quotes for the job. Not all applications do this, resulting in my pet peeve of typography - the ugly, stray prime mark as an apostrophe.
Even though good applications should be able to do as much of this kind of thing as possible without you having to do a lot of tweaking, you should be aware of these kinds of things so that you can make sure that these auto replacements are in fact doing what you want them to and not just messing up your text setting.

I suppose all caps with parentheses is less called for as a rule.

Except when introducing acronyms: e.g., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) ...

but shouldn't those actually be smallcaps? LOL *breaks out Elements*

Acutally, I guess if you follow Bringhurst's suggestions it should be Nasa, since that's how we read it (page 49).

Nasa is a little rare because you read it like a word, acronyms such as International Business Machines (IBM) or What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) don't pronounce as words so well.

I would simply use the same conventions used for all other acronyms in the piece. and if you choose to kern or vertically adjust the baseline I would bring to your attention another point Bringhurst makes.

Kern consistently and modestly or not at all. (page 32)

"Dumb" quotes have become the norm. (It's a dumb old world, innit?)

Curly quotes tip off average readers that the text is too difficult for them (or the product advertised too upscale). Or that it's historical usage.

The demise of the curly quote makes sense -- why complicate typography with unnecessary alternate glyphs for the same character, whose usage is determined by arcane contextual conventions?

There is a parallel: the long "s" was a similarly deployed alternate form abolished during a period of rapid typographic modernization, c.1800.

Perhaps a visual distinction between start and finish quotes served a functional purpose when sentences were generally much longer, but not today. Any other functional reason?

Aesthetically, curly quotes have possibly one leg to stand on: they harmonize with serifed faces which betray their calligraphic origins by having a marked stroke contrast, and angled stress. Here, the non-calligraphic vertical hash-mark is not quite right, but perhaps no more bizarre than the perfectly circular old-style zero which is deemed proper for such faces. For the vast majority of type genres, the "hash mark" is quite at home, and in many, such as the typical grotesque, Helvetica, it is the "proper" quote mark which is aesthetically at odds with the letter-forms, not the hash mark.

>why haven't the companies that sell fonts corrected this in the font coding itself

We follow convention, which is what customers want.

For instance, here is a prototype sample of a custom font I designed a couple of years ago. The quote marks are the same for all three character positions: left, right, and hash. You can even use it for inches. However, the client requested that the quote marks follow the standard arrangement.


Obviously, it would be better to have a single glyph for all 3 traditional usages, because there is no way that "smart" quote software in InDesign, Quark, etc., can distinguish between an abbrevation and a quotation -- hence rendering the mark in abbreviations such as '05 the wrong way round.

The only better alternative that would work: total typographic literacy, taught in grade school, the fastidious way writing used to be taught. I remember, back in the '60s, being marked for an essay out of 20: 10 marks for grammar, 5 for spelling, and 5 for writing. No marks for creative expression, which is where the emphasis is now.

[Thanks everyone for your replies. It's much appreciated.

The books aren't that dry to me. That was just a bit of my sarcasm that sometimes doesn't translate well online. One of my resolutions this year was to give up using emoticons in emails and online forums, so my sense of humor will be a bit harder to pick up.

Actually, I found Bringhurst's book quite fascinating, up until the Golden Rule chapter, which could've been written in Chinese because I couldn't understand a thing.

Even though I'm a newbie, I do love type and typography. I remember last year my wife and I were at a wedding for one of her co-workers. We were seated at a table with one of the co-worker's professors from Art Center. We got to talking and he asked me what my favorite typeface was. I replied that it was Scala at that time. His face lit up and he said that he used that a lot for his classes and we had a short discussion. The whole time, our wives were just sitting there quiet, yet both thinking, "Good God! Couldn't they at least talk about

sports. Couldn't they at least talk about sports.

Sorry about that. Sometimes the email reply system cuts me off at the end. Didn't want to leave you guys hanging.

Mark, by the way, I'm the guy who had a bit of trouble downloading Coquette in mid-December. It's lovely. You'll soon be seeing it in signs at our DFS Duty Free stores at airports across the US. I believe our closest store to you would be in JFK Terminal 4 in New York. I'd post a sample of the art, but I don't have access to our servers here at work.

David, I've read Elements once through and once more excluding the Golden Ratio chapters (and keep it at my desk for ref.). I'm still struggling to find time to really dig into it (grad school, probably) and understand its application to typography and book design fully, In spite of the fact that I've already learned about and used the Golden Ratio/Mean/Rectangle in art school. That chapter reminds me just a tad of G