Please ask Apple to support proper apostrophes when expanding contractions

[alanh]

It’s a simple idea: When you type “cant” on your iOS device, wouldn’t you at least like the option that it expand into “can’t” (U+2019), not the ASCII “can't”?

It’s 2012, and Unicode is everywhere — including in iOS’s own software keyboard. (Tap and hold on e.g. the normal apostrophe to be able to select typographer’s single quotes.) Why should contractions expand into ugly, 1995-era ASCII representations?

Apple itself, for example, wouldn’t use an ASCII apostrophe in its own marketing content; for example, there are a number of apostrophes on apple.com/ipad, all of which are “educated.”

I submitted a feature request to Apple (rdar bug ID: #11156286) proposing that they at least add such an option to their General › Keyboard options.

If you agree, please “dupe” #11156286, as this counts as a vote in Apple’s system. https://bugreport.apple.com/

Thanks!

[mchannon]

Can't say I agree with this; Unicode may be ubiquitous for a number of spheres, but there are plenty of legacy systems that have trouble with things like "educated" apostrophes and ligatures like fi or æ. Your "can’t" after getting washed through a few different systems may end up coming out as my "can&2019t" or similar garbage. Non-US users run into this far more frequently.

A better workaround would be for apple to use a little bit of on-the-spot processing and display the educated version but send the dumbed-down version, much like it would substitute a ligature in rastered text.

I can&2019t think of a less strict grammatical environment than text messaging.

[alanh → mchannon]

I understand your concern.

- Agree sending dumb quotes over SMS if it really does still matter in the real world is best

- Do not believe it would be worth keeping denying the feature request altogether just because some legacy systems barf on unicode is smart. Especially if it’s an optional feature.

- Also note that nothing stops you from pasting in or manually entering (e.g. tap-and-hold on normal apostrophe key) any number of non-ASCII characters in the SMS or other contexts.