

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”?<p>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?<p>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.”<p>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.<p><i>If you agree, please “dupe” #11156286, as this counts as a vote in Apple’s system.</i>  https://bugreport.apple.com/<p>Thanks!
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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.

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alanh
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.

