mac how to on the apple macintosh many special characters are available by typing while holding down the option key or option and shift keys together and these are shown in the keyboard viewer in macintosh english language keyboard layouts the curved opening single quotation mark is typed option and a curved closing single quotation mark apostrophe is typed with the shortcut option shift similarly the curved curved double quotation marks are typed option and option shift on mac os x the character palette gives access to all the unicode characters and can show the unicode tables giving the number i've shown a version of the paragraphs above at apostrophe entering typographic apostrophes which also shows how to enter unicode characters in ms windows presumably this info should appear here not sure how to organise it a new subsection talk