That’s right, typography über alles. A nice article on receding hairline exposes some common typographic mistakes, and how to fix them. I was aware of some of them, and I think I know how to fix them in LaTeX:
- Use “ and ” for quotes, always. emacs does this automatically, if in tex mode!
- ‘ should do the trick, I guess.
- $’$ should work, probably.
- $\times$. As before, math comes to the rescue.
- $^\circ$ seems a decent choice.
- This is well known in LaTeX: –, —, and — produce a hyphen, n-dash, and m-dash. $-$ is the minus sign.
- I don’t get this point so clearly, but $17.99$ is standard math in LaTeX. $\cdot$ may be used for a centred dot.
- $\ldots$. Any respectable LaTeXist knows that!
- Ok, parentheses they are. That’s what they are called in Spanish, anyway.
- $\frac{1}{2}$ is a decent choice, but it seems the standard unicode character should be recognized using latin1 encoding, or surely XeTeX.
Update: at some stage, latex has begun to accept (with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}), things like “”, ·, @ (nice for email addresses), æ (nice for CV’s); also, ¿ and 1º (Spanish). Some things like ½ are not supported, but they are in XeTeX.
Daniel Duque Campayo 