Alleged Literature : Damian Cugley : 2003

Latin-1p: Latin-1 with English punctuation

This is a character encoding designed to be useful for Unix systems and other ASCII-centric operating systems. It addresses a widespread defect in computer operating systems whereby characters derived from ASCII (or one of the ISO 646 encodings) are given priority over those needed to write in the English language.

Note. This document assumes your web browser (or whatever display software you are using) understands and can display Unicode punctuation characters. For many browsers, such as Opera or Mozilla on Linux, this is not the case at the time of writing. Please use your imagination...

Do I need to use Latin-1p?

On windoes systems with recent HTML-writing software so-called ‘smart quotes’ should work as they appear on the screen. Older versions get it wrong because they label documents saved using the Windows-1252 encoding as if they were in ISO-8859–1. This worked if documents prepared on Windows were only viewed on Windows systems using sloppily written browsers. Modern editions of Microsoft FrontPage encode quotation marks as numeric entities in HTML, which works well enough.

If you use a text editor that does not have ‘smart’ quotes then you are stuck entering the character codes (in Windows-1252, in decimal) on your numeric keypad, or else using Character Map. In this case you may find that using the Latin-1p conventions is more convenient.

On Macintosh systems you can type English punctuation amrks directly (using the Option key). Again old text editors and even old HTML editors blithely write the MacRoman character codes to the text files and then present them as if they were in ISO 8859–1, with even more ugly results, since the MacRoman punctuation characters become accented letters on non-Macintosh systems. Again, more modern software gets it right, and so Latin-1p may be irrelevant to you.

Most Unix and Linux systems have patchy support for Unicode and Unicode encodings at best, and entering punctuation marks in to your favourite text editor may be simply impossible. Latin-1p may be an attractive alternative to typing character entities for every mark of punctuation in a document.

Further reading

Marks of quotation
Damian Cugley. My original rant on quotation marks, January 2003.
ASCII and Unicode Quotation Marks
Markus Kuhn. ‘Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark’ Apparently it’s even worse for people typing English on German keyboards
The Q Tag Revisited
Mark Pilgrim. ‘I just retired my use of the Q tag.’ Patchy implementation of the q tag makes it useless, so ignore it.

21 January 2003