Quotation and other marks, lowercase numerals, and dashes

- Next are quotation marks and apostrophes,…and two other rarely used characters called "primes".…Once again, in the typewriter days,…these two characters did lots of things,…opened and closed single quotes,…double quotes, plus the apostrophe,…plus inch and foot marks,…plus minute and second marks.…Desktop Publishing picked up…these conventions without modification.…For a lack of a better word, I'm going to…call these "hash marks", not hashtags.…

And they're basically non-characters;…they're not typography characters,…and they're not quotation marks.…By now, everybody knows that true quotation marks…are curly quotes and they're now the default in most places,…although not often on the web.…The opening quote is fattest on the bottom…and tails off at the top,…and the closed quote is the opposite.…You can see that the closed quote and the comma…have a lot in common, but they're not the same.…The closed quote does look like the apostrophe.…

The apostrophe and a single closed quote…are the same character.…But they're not, however, our foot and inch marks,…