Punctuation
Punctuation is defined as the use of spacing and special characters, a set of conventional signs, and certain typographical techniques as aids to the understanding and reading of written text.
Contents |
[edit] Typing
Many people learned punctuation rules when learning to type. Standard typing techniques do not transfer into books and eBooks. For example adding two spaces after the end of a sentence is not used today. Many useful punctuation symbols used in books are not available on a standard keyboard.
[edit] The marks
The list of punctuation marks:
- Full stop (period)
- Comma: separates parts of a sentence,
- Question mark: the sign for interrogative intonation,
- Exclamation mark
- Space: word separator, a line feed & multiple spaces (or a tab) start a paragraph.
- Dash,
- Hyphen,
- Semicolon ; separate parts of complex sentences,
- Colon :
- Ellipsis ... is usually used but there is a symbol available …
- Quotation marks require an open and close and use a different symbol for quotations within a quotation. " and ' on a standard keyboard.
Many of these symbols differ by country and/or language.
[edit] Differences
Different languages and even different countries speaking the same language use different symbols (glyphs) and have different rules for punctuation which may influence the eBook creation as well. In addition some font sets vary the shape of the glyphs. In particular the quotation marks have significant variations. They also differ from other punctuation in that they typically have an open and a close symbol.
[edit] Spanish
Often uses inverted characters; "¿" at the beginning and "?" at the end of a question, and similarly a "¡" at the beginning and "!" at the end of an Exclamation.
[edit] French
Use "«" and "»" to open and close a quotation as do the Russians. Quotes within a quot use "‹" and "›". The Swedish uses the same symbols but backwards with the exit quotation symbol used to start the quotation.
