Kyle

Some half-crazed moron at Microsoft, in an attempt to be helpful, made an idiotic decision.

Of what do I speak? Microsoft Entourage (11.3.6.070618) attempts to be both convenient and pretty by replacing apostrophes (') with curly quotes (’). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t complain. I like curly-quotes as much as the next guy, and I regularly use a vim plugin called UniCycle to achieve the same effect. HOWEVER, Entourage knows that it only wants to send text email in the ISO-8859-1 (aka “Latin1”) character set, which does not contain a curly-quote. This presents the age-old conundrum: “wanna curly quote, can’t have a curly quote”. So Entourage must choose a different character from the ISO-8859-1 character set to use instead of the curly quote. The obvious choice would be the apostrophe ('); people are used to it, and after all it is a quote! But what does Entourage choose? A superscript 1, like this: ¹

What goon came up with this? A superscript 1, in most fonts (except at very small sizes) looks nothing like a quotation mark. It looks like the number one! Which is exactly what it is! And, let’s be honest here, how many fonts do you suppose have a superscript one character but NOT a curly quote or an apostrophe? Besides looking stupid, Microsoft isn’t not actually improving their compatibility at all!

But, I suppose, what did I expect from such an “innovative” company?