What is with the accent marks?

[Joel Stransky]

Why do most all fonts have an ugly-ass accent mark? Most of the logo's I have to rebuild have nice clean accent marks that look like a comma. Whenever I match the font and type it out there is always a butt-ugly accent mark. It looks more like the top of an exclamation mark than an accent/apostorphie.

[Gene Trujillo]

There are a number of different "accent marks". Two common ones are acutes and graves. They aren't supposed to look like commas, they're supposed to to be straight and tapered -- something like the top of an exclamation mark as you describe, but angled.

There are other accent marks, such as the breve which is something like (but isn't) a comma on it's side, or the circumflex which is angled. Perhaps you mean to use one of those instead?

[Joel Stransky]

My appologies, I was actually talking about the apostorphie. God knows why I called it an accent mark. :P Thanks for the response guys!

[Neil Keller]

Joel,

Or there is the cedilla, which looks like a comma hanging off the bottom of a c (ç Ç).

But, just as Gene says, other common accents: acute (é É), grave (è È), circumflex (î Î), umlaut (ü Ü), tilde (ñ Ñ), etc., are definitely NOT comma shaped, and the proper position is centered just over their respective letters -- and not off to the right as they are so often misused.

Neil

[Gene Trujillo]

Joel,

That makes it a different question altogether!

You want to use "typographer's quotes" or "curly quotes" instead of the "primes" (which look much like the top of exclamation marks) that are the default. A lot of programs have an option to use "typographer's quotes" or "smart quotes", but how you do it depends on the application.

Otherwise, if you're on PC type alt+0146 on the numeric keypad. On MAC it's shift+option+]

Good luck,

Gene

[Joel Stransky]

Perfect! That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks a ton Gene and Neil