Code generally uses only ASCII!

[pne]

I always get a little bit sad when I see documentation that includes code snippets that have curly quotes, such as print “This is a test.\n”. I doubt that that code would even compile if you copy-pasted it into a file and compiled/ran it with the language in question. What's even worse is German documentation that takes "smart" quotes one step further and gives you print „This is a test.\n“—which not only has a really ugly closing quote in the Courier New so often used for code examples (the lines should point NE/SW rather than SW/SE for a German closing single quote IMO), but is even less similar to the correct print "This is a test.\n".

A related sadness comes when two consecutive hyphens turn into an en or em dash… reading about program invocations such as hello —foo=bar —baz=qux seems to me also a mark of bad typography (so as not to say "incompetence").

And finally, reading bits of code that use ligatures is something along those lines as well: my $file, for example. Eep.

Comments

[noidd.livejournal.com]

LaTeX will do this for you automatically unless you specify it as code.

[pne.livejournal.com]

So will other programs, e.g. Apple's Keynote… I talked to someone once at a YAPC::Europe presentation whose code was "guilty" of that; he showed me that he had typed in f-i-l-e and that the program automagically made ligatures on the fly; deleting the "i" resulted in an f-l ligature instead, for example.

Still hateful and bad code typography; if your program does this for you automatically, I think that to be taken seriously as a publisher, you should be aware of the fact and take specific measures to counteract this where it's not appropriate. Whether it's an intern using Word and sneaking in smart quotes or a geek using LaTeX and sneaking in ligatures.

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

All of the text that we get for posting into web-applications and web-pages gets formatted in Word. Now imagine a 12 page legal agreement the customer has to be presented with and "agree" to before they can have some software, and it's full of curly quotes, curly apostrophes, and other random "Word-crap" that, for whatever reason, it becomes my job to fix.

I'm not sure why it's my job to fix it. Probably because there's no-one after me.