Quotes and Accents; Style; Featured Free Font: DT Hebrinks

No Drop Monday as I underestimated just how much time it would take to prepare for a guest lecture on a survey of data visualization topics for the University of New England.

For those that helped me focus some of the lecture (I put a call out on social media) — thank you!

For everyone, you can grab the slides and some R code which recreates the awesome Boston Globe tariff-induced stock market selloff at the end of last week: hrbrmstr/2025-04-07-dsc-260: Code for DSC 260 lecture on 2025-04-07 – Codeberg.org.

---

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using Ollama + llama 3.2 and a custom prompt.)

• Smart quotes and accent marks have evolved over time, with modern typography incorporating smart quotes to restore typographic elegance and dynamic placement of floating accents in OpenType fonts. (http://quotesandaccents.com/)
• The Style Manual provides a comprehensive guide to British and American English punctuation rules, covering various punctuation marks and offering guidance on their proper usage.
• DT Hebrinks Typeface is a charming serif font with elegant design elements, available for personal use free of charge and commercial use through a freemium model. (https://dryana19.gumroad.com/l/DTHebrinks)

---

Quotes and Accents

Typography, the art and technique of arranging type, has a rich history intertwined with the evolution of written language. Among its many elements, smart quotes and accent marks hold a unique place, bridging historical practices with modern design for glowing rectangles (and other contexts).

Quotation marks trace their origins to the ancient Greek diple (›), a mark used to highlight noteworthy text. By the Renaissance, printers began experimenting with various methods to denote quotations, such as italicizing text or placing it in contrasting typefaces. The modern quotation mark emerged in the 16th century when printers adopted double commas (,,) as a standardized way to indicate quoted material. Over time, these evolved into the inverted commas (“ ”) we recognize today.

By the 17th century, quotation marks were being used to denote direct speech and pithy commentary. Regional variations also developed: British typography elevated quotation marks to the height of capital letters, while French printers introduced guillemets (« »), angular quotation marks designed for clarity and aesthetic balance.

With the dawn of the typewriter age in the 19th century, straight quotes (” ’), also known as “dumb quotes,” became standard due to mechanical limitations. These simplified characters persisted into early computer systems with also limited character sets, like ASCII, which only supported straight quotes for efficiency.

The introduction of “smart quotes” — curly or typographic quotation marks — aimed to restore typographic elegance. Smart quotes curve inward toward the text they enclose, mimicking traditional typesetting practices. They became widely adopted in word processors (ah, those simpler times) and design software, often implemented through algorithms that automatically convert straight quotes into their curly counterparts. However, these algorithms are not foolproof (Hi, Siri!!!) and can misinterpret context, requiring manual corrections in complex text.

Accent marks, or diacritics, have been used for centuries to indicate pronunciation, stress, or meaning in various languages. For example:

• the acute accent (´) originated in Ancient Greek to denote high pitch and later transitioned into a stress marker in Modern Greek and other languages like French.
• other accents, such as the grave (`), circumflex (ˆ), tilde (˜), umlaut (¨), and cedilla (¸), serve linguistic purposes ranging from vowel length to phonetic distinctions.

In typography, accent marks must be carefully designed to integrate seamlessly with their base characters. Modern font technologies like OpenType allow for dynamic placement of floating accents, enabling better support for multilingual text without compromising design integrity. This flexibility is crucial for globalized communication where accurate rendering of names and words is both a practical necessity and a sign of respect.

I bring this up in today’s Drop, since I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the auto-correction in Apple’s ecosystem, and have been forced to disable the “picky mode” of LanguageTool, since there are many contexts I do not want to use “smart” quotes (and, that’s either “off” or “on” by default with LT).

This is forcing me to [re]learn the magic keystrokes for Quotes and Accents, which Jessica Hische was kind enough to create in a very digestible way.

Yes, all that blather, just to give you a cheat sheet (but, you may know more about where these odd standards came from, now.)

---

Style

Since we’re being pedantic today, the Style Manual is a personal reference guide focused on British (Australian) spelling while drawing from both British and American English punctuation rules. Andy Taylot aims to help us select the most sensible rules from both traditions, creating a comprehensive yet admittedly incomplete style reference that documents opinions from multiple style guides while establishing personal conclusions.

The manual covers various punctuation marks in detail, providing guidance on their proper usage. For apostrophes, it explains they’re primarily used for contractions and possession, not pluralization. The manual notes different opinions for various situations, such as on possessives ending in ‘s’: The Elements of Style recommends adding ‘s to all possessive singulars (Charles’s), while The New York Times Manual makes exceptions for words ending in certain sibilant sounds (Kansas’ Governor). For plural possessives, the apostrophe typically follows the s (girls’ dresses), except when the word is already plural without an s (children’s playground).

Andy provides guidance on abbreviating words, noting that when abbreviating “and” to “n” (as in “Fish ‘n’ Chips”), apostrophes should appear on both sides since both the beginning and end of “and” are omitted. For title capitalization, it recommends capitalizing all words except short ones like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.

His refence also includes a section on commonly misused words such as affect/effect, center/centre, e.g./i.e., and it’s/its, providing clear explanations of their correct usage. It concludes with a bibliography of British and American style references and a section of definitions for grammatical terms.

It’s concise, accessible, and something to keep bookmarked.

---

Featured Freemium Font: DT Hebrinks Typeface

DT Hebrinks Typeface is, dare I say, a charming and graceful serif font that was released back in March. This typeface is characterized by its elegant design that balances classic serif elements with modern aesthetics. I’m not normally a huge fan of serif fonts, but I kinda dig the “curves” and the “kick-ups” of many of the serif tails.

Free for personal use; freemium for commercial use.

---

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on:

• 🐘 Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev
• 🦋 Bluesky via https://bsky.app/profile/dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev.web.brid.gy

☮️