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I stumbled across the following sentence in the description of “unclear what you’re asking” close reason:

As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

The first it's as well as the you're uses the typewriter or vertical apostrophe (U+0027 ') while the second it’s shows the typographic or curly apostrophe (U+2019 ’), which is the preferred character to use for apostrophe according to the Unicode standard.

This applies to the description on closed questions as well as the close dialog. On https://askubuntu.com/help/closed-questions on the other hand only typewriter apostrophes are used.

As a typography enthusiast I'd opt for the curly apostrophe, but I’m fine with the alternative as well – as long as it’s consistent!

What's the difference you may ask. Well, try echo it’s as opposed to echo it's in your favorite shell once…

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  • How does one even write that apostrophe? I just have the single quote.
    – TheWanderer
    May 10, 2018 at 23:28
  • @TheWanderer It’s AltGr+Shift+N.
    – dessert
    May 10, 2018 at 23:30
  • That's my tilde. The closest I have is ´, which is an accent and not the same thing.
    – TheWanderer
    May 10, 2018 at 23:35
  • 1
    Found it. It's AltGr+} for me. ’
    – TheWanderer
    May 10, 2018 at 23:37
  • @TheWanderer Now you just need to find ‘, “ and ” and you’re able to quote beautifully.
    – dessert
    May 10, 2018 at 23:40
  • ‘ ” ” I gotchu. Just combos of Shift and the other bracket.
    – TheWanderer
    May 10, 2018 at 23:46
  • What if you don't have AltGR?
    – fosslinux
    May 11, 2018 at 7:56
  • @ubashu Then you just define a different shortcut I guess. :)
    – dessert
    May 11, 2018 at 8:16
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    If you don't have any key that produces that character, just press Ctrl+Shift+U2019
    – Zanna Mod
    May 11, 2018 at 8:26
  • 1
    This is hilarious... It's been this way for five years, and I just never noticed because they look the same in the usual font.
    – Shog9
    May 18, 2018 at 23:57

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I don't know why it's this way, but that’s how someone wrote them. I blame Google Docs.

Changing it now means forcing the International sites to re-translate the entire close reason, so... Doesn't seem like a good use of their time. But if we ever make a substantive edit to that close reason, we'll definitely mess with apostrophes some more.

tl’dr: Unicode ruins everything.

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