Manual: •.,:;?·

Садись. Двойка! - "Sit down, you got an F" :) - sorry, as bulgarian it was funny to me this used as example (from russian).

Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.

1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.

There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.

Original title:

Manual: •.,:;…!?·

(Except printed in a really cool font!)

Nice reference – thanks for the post!