Typographic entities are those characters in text that aren’t letters or numbers. Things like ”, “, and ’. But many web designers don’t realize that these characters are different from the ones that are on the keyboard. For example, the double-quotation mark—when you type the character above the comma on your keyboard you get ", a straight up and down quotation mark. However “ and ” are curved in towards the text they are quoting. This type of attention to detail marks a designer who cares deeply about all aspects of the design of web pages (that or they are a total control freak! *smile*). How important are using these types of typographic entities to you in your design?
More Help with Web Typography
- Web Typography
- Typography on the Web is About the Little Details
- One Space After a Period - Web Typography Basics
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One major problem with entities is HTML encoding. If you haven’t sent the charset properly on your page or your mailing, you end up with question marks replacing your entities (at best) or a trio of other characters (at worst – examples of these other characters include Á and Æ).
This is especially noticeable and easily overlooked on mailings. Technically-speaking, the only charset standard for email clients is us-ascii (the default if no other charset is specified – RFC 822, RFC 2045-2049). Entities like ”, “, and ’ aren’t included in us-ascii, but they are in iso-8859. Unless you specify that charset in your mailing template and make sure your mailing headers (especially your Subject) are encoded, you run the risk of having your mailing content garbled when it reaches your user’s inbox.
One of my more common problems at work relates to editors copying and pasting from Microsoft Word into the Content Management System (CMS); the CMS is perfectly capable of handling the entities and the website displays them properly. Ironically, although Microsoft Word “auto-corrects” double quotes, single quotes, and hyphens to the so-called “smart” curly quotes and en and em dashes, Microsoft Outlook doesn’t support the display of these entities in mailings by default.
You also have to be careful about DKIM-signing software. This software may convert your mailing headers to us-ascii in order to perform the DKIM signing, then convert back to the original charset. Entities in the Subject field (for example) can’t handle that.
@Red: true. I don’t reccommend using entities copy/pasted from say a Word doc. I use the numerical codes. Like “ for an open curly quote.