Re: typestyle of punctuation

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Thanks to Bill Troop for the fascinating extract from Bringhurst. As a
copy editor, I am forever wrestling with the typography of punctuation. I
was therefore somewhat startled by Leslie's first post on the subject,
but then I see he corrected himself. The general rule in publishing in
the US has been "periods and commas inside quotation marks, colons and
semis outside, question marks and exclamation points according to their
meaning"; that is, if they're part of the quotation, within the quotes,
if not, outside. In the days when type was set by human beings, not
algorithms, the same rules obtained for italics, except that semis and
colons were ital after an italicized word too. (And the same for bold.)
But without the extra spacing that a human typesetter knows enough to add
when a roman question mark or screamer followed an italic word, you can
get ascenders on italic words abutting roman question marks and exclams.
So the modern tendency is to put the query or the screamer in ital too.
Personally, I try to recast the sentence to avoid that, esp. when a title
is involved, lest the punctuation seem part of the title (as it is, for
example, in Oklahoma! but would not be in, say, "What a mess he
made of Hamlet!"
	Apostrophes used to follow the same rule: if you used the genitive in
apostrophe and ess after an italicized word (whether foreign, emphasized,
or a title), the apostrophe and the ess should be roman. But now, though
the ess is still roman (in carefully set work), the apostrophe tends to
be ital to prevent an abutment.
	As for brackets and parens, the traditional practice was to put them in
the itals if they were inherently part of the italicized matter, but not
if they were not. But aesthetic considerations do war against logic here.

	By the by, really sharp-eyed proofreaders can sometimes see a difference
between an italic and a roman comma. One of the things I love about
XyWrite is the ability to get punctuation where it belongs in terms of
end quotes and end itals with a quick CI (or of course a macro).
	On footnotes, I think Pamela is right: you have to enter the period and
space each time you type in the note or else do a CI. But I would
recommend that if you set your notes hanging indent, as Pamela mentioned
and I like to do (makes it easier for the reader to see where one note
ends and the next begins), you use a tab, not a space, after the number
and period. That way, you won't have the first line of the note text
beginning at position 4 for the first nine notes, then at position 5, and
maybe, if you run to more than 99 notes, at position 6.
Patricia