Punctuation Cheat Sheet
Jens Meiert, June 3, 2009.
This entry is filed under Design.
Working with and localizing international sites means an interesting challenge, not just for right-to-left contents. Typographically, there are differences between many locales. To get punctuation right I’m using a simple aid that I like to finally share:
This localization documentation contains a bunch of languages along with their ISO codes to feature primary and secondary quotation marks mostly as of Wikipedia, some characters that tend not to be used the right way that often, like dashes and ellipses, and also some notes on the use of decimal points vs. decimal commas.
Despite the cheat sheet not being a 100 % complete yet I hope it can prove valuable for more people, especially if you like to help me improve it. A different location and alternatives formats for the cheat sheet are under investigation.
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Enjoy the most popular posts, probably including:
Comments
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On June 3, 2009, 20:59 CEST, John Drinkwater said:
A minor change:
Language, ISO, primary, secondary
English (US), en-us, “”,
English, en, ‘’, “”Instead of tickboxes for decimal separators, you need a numbers page for: decimal points (1?23), separators (1?234?000), negative values (-123 or (123) etc), etc.
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On June 4, 2009, 13:13 CEST, Neovov said:
Awesome!
I’d planned to do the same thing but only in French & English. I hope I’ll can help you
.
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On June 4, 2009, 16:13 CEST, pepelsbey said:
Oh, useful thing.
One more special rule for Russian punctuation: spaces before and after middle dash.
Blah — blah.
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On June 5, 2009, 18:03 CEST, Reese Payton said:
Cheat sheets are the best! Thanks for your work and your time, it will be a useful tool for many.
Reese -
On June 7, 2009, 2:57 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Thank you! I updated the cheat sheet to reflect some facts I recently learned about (although Swiss decimal separators, for instance, aren’t completely transparent I find), and I also included some Windows shortcuts.
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On June 7, 2009, 21:37 CEST, dillon said:
Thanks for all your great work. I am sure that i will be able to take advantage of the cheat sheet!
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On June 18, 2009, 19:48 CEST, Donna said:
Always a fan of cheat sheets.
Had not thought to check Wikipedia for an article on international punctuation. Heading there next. Thanks!
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On June 25, 2009, 7:52 CEST, Martijn van der Ven said:
How about adding thousands separators to the cheat sheet as well? Wikipedia mentions them on their page about decimal separators too. From their examples of use many of the needed information can be taken.
The most notable country here would in fact be Switserland, where an apostrophe is used. Something which certain other countries—I’ve seen German friends use it—only do in handwriting.
