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on quality

2023-02-04

Just a quick one today: A big “Dankeschön” to Michael Nordmeyer. He unknowingly reminded me through one of his posts that gemini content is in written in UTF-8 and that this opens up the possibility to use proper typography.

I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of users / readers won't even notice the subtle differences, but it gives me a great deal of joy. Let us all thrive to bring some good old-fashioned quality back, shall we?

So here we have them and their usage:

ellipsis : …

in quotation, an ellipsis signifies omitted words and sentences
faltering speech or a pause

hyphen : -

indicates breaks within words that wrap at end of line
connects compound words like mass-produced
connects grouped numbers like a phone number 555-1234-4642

n-dash : –

joins numbers in a range (from–to) 5–12
joins words that describe a range: July–October

m-dash : —

sets apart a unique idea, an inserted thought.

lastly, the quotes:

left double quote : “
right double quote : ”
left single quote : ‘
right single quote : ’

Of course we can take this a step or three forward... UTF-8 also provides latin script letters in 𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑠, 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, u͟n͟d͟e͟r͟l͟i͟n͟e͟d͟ and s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶. The downside of those being that they fix the font to being serif, sans-serif or whatever you chose — usually that decision should be given to the client, not the server.

I'll be pondering the use of those, the usual Markdown _underline_ and *emphasis* do work fine in my opinion, even though gemtext doesn't define these as having meaning and thus clients usually won't do anything with it.

What do you all think about this? Maybe you've already come up with a similar — or very different — solution?

So that is it… go and visit Michael Nordmeyer on his own page, it is a good one.

Links

Michael Nordmeyer

Yaytext, copy & paste a text in various Unicode styles.

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