Forum:Italicized quotation marks

Forums → Ten Forward → Italicized quotation marks (reply • watch)

Sulfur has advised me that it is MA policy that, when quotations are italicized, the quotation marks themselves are not. It is a good thing for all MA pages to look the same; but this particular look doesn't look good: The italicized quotation marks "HERE" hug the text; the non-italicized quotation marks "HERE" do not, but float away from it. On my own screen (because my default font doesn't have italics and Mozilla fakes it in an exaggerated way), this even leads to overprinting on the right side and an apparent extra space on the left side. Is this really the way y'all want it? Spike-from-NH 18:02, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

Depends, I guess. What is the intended meaning (the semantics) of the quotation marks, what the meaning of the italics? If they even have a separate meaning, then there probably is a sensible order in which those two need to be nested, independent of how the outcome looks. If there is no separate meaning, and actually both form of markup are supposed to mean the same thing, we should (A) determine whether we really need both formattings at the same time, and if yes (B) do it via a template. -- Cid Highwind 18:10, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

They're in the context of quotes within text. As in, Cid said "What is the intended meaning?" With a font that has italics, it looks just normal and fine. When a font has to fake something out, it's always going to look weird. -- sulfur 18:21, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

So, no separate meaning? Are they both really necessary, then? -- Cid Highwind 18:27, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

Cid, my query does not depend on semantics but only on typographical aesthetics. (Sulfur, it looks bad in general; it merely looks especially bad to me with the home-brew font.) For example, the style guide I usually follow uses that same criterion to put period and comma inside quotes, even when the period or comma is not part of the thing quoted. (Wikipedia comes down on the other side and puts them inside or outside the quotes based on where they belong.) Spike-from-NH 18:34, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

It's formatting to show that it's a quote rather than plain encyclopedic text. Standard markup. In terms of periods and other such punctuation, they go inside the quote, unless the thing in quotes refers to a proper name (such as an episode, documentary, etc). -- sulfur 18:36, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

But if two styles with a semantic value are used, we can't just ignore semantics and talk about aesthetics. There is a difference between, in markup terms, <QUOTE><EMPHASIS>Text</EMPHASIS></QUOTE> and <EMPHASIS><QUOTE>Text</QUOTE></EMPHASIS> - the former would be appropriate if something was emphasized by the actor who uttered the phrase, while the latter would be appropriate in cases where we want to emphasize something that happens to be a quote. It stands to reason that just wanting to have a different font for quote content is neither the former nor the latter, so should use a different formatting altogether.

Again, I am not proposing that the font of the "Text" change, only the font of the quotation marks, so that they appear in the correct position with respect to the text. (Upon further review, it is ignorable in Arial and Palatino; looks subtly incorrect in Tahoma and Cambria; looks pathetic in my personal font (which MA obviously has no duty to correct).) And aesthetics is my only basis for making the suggestion. The quotation marks are never part of the thing they quote, so didactically they should never be italic; the alignment just looks better if they are. Spike-from-NH 18:50, January 5, 2012 (UTC)