A good and useful website which I've visited previously albeit some time ago. It has very useful hints—even for those who've difficulty in telling the difference between Courier New and Comic Sans.

I claim no great expertise in typography but I'm sensitive to typefaces and kerning and spacing, also page layout. I've been known to not buy a book because its pages are ugly. If the typeface and layout are distracting then I'm constantly reminded of the fact and it slows down my comprehension of the text.

I could spend hours on this but clearly that's not possible so I'll just make a couple of observations. I'm in full agreement with Butterick when he says

"Good typography is measured by how well it reinforces the meaning of the text, not by some abstract scale of merit. Typographic choices that work for one text won’t necessarily work for another. Corollary: good typographers don’t rely on rote solutions. One size never fits all."

For example, I'm a great fan of Garamond and I even use its ligatures but I'd never use the typeface in, say, a letter or email—nor would I use Comic Sans‡ in these contexts except in the circumstance of an old friend who always uses it in his emails.

Butterick also makes the following points with which I concur but with qualification:

"Always use curly quotes."

"Compared to straight quotes, curly quotes are more legible on the page and match the other characters better. Therefore, straight quotes should never, ever appear in your documents."

Whilst I agree I rarely use them, and when I do it's when I've selected, say, Garamond for some special task—it would be sacrilege to use straight quotes in such contexts.

Butterick makes the comment that "Most bad habits endemic to digital typography are former typewriter habits.†", thus this is my reason for mostly using straight quotes. Fact is we've still not fully kicked the typewriter habit yet and our QWERTY keyboards still reflect this by complicating the entry of any character that's not base ASCII despite UTF8 being the commonplace norm these days.

Furthermore, we still use plaintext editors like the dreaded Windows Notepad, despite it being Unicode compatible, and so on (as with many text editors, Notepad is nigh on useless when it comes to entering non-ASCII Unicode characters). There's still no agreement on how curly quotes are converted to or cut-&-pasted into or between editors so it's for compatibility reasons I still use straight quotes.

This problem won't be solved anytime soon I reckon, at minimum, it would at least require all plaintext editors to display Markdown and for Markdown or similar to be available in all wordprocessors, and there's no agreement on that.

Butterick suggests ways around this by keying in ALT codes and such (and I use them regularly for Greek characters, etc.) but it's far from being a universal practice. Moreover, that's still too complicated (see Buttrick's HTML example which is different). Universality—a common standard for entry—is what's required to make curly quotes universal and unfortunately that's still a long way from being implemented.

—

† As happenstance would have it, this quote appears in Butterick's webpage written exactly thus:

"Most bad habits endemic to digital typography are former TYPEWRITER HABITS".

I cut-&-pasted Buttrick's quote from his website without alteration directly into HN's edit box and the uppercase text was immediately converted to lowercase. I'd not planned this but I could hardly have had a better illustration of the problem than this excellent example.

I hope Butterick actually reads this post, he'll then further appreciate what we're up against—and why people like me still insist (at least for the main part) in using straight quotes.

—

‡ I understand why Connare's Comic Sans MS is often considered the butt of typeface jokes and I think that's rather unfair. Its notoriety is why I've used it here as an example—not because it's a bad typeface, which it isn't. It's actually a good typeface for its original intended purpose of comic balloons (for Microsoft's Bob). It's not a typeface I relish much but many, many people like its informality and we need to respect that.