Unicode typography in translations

[Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag gmail com>]

Hello translators,

You might have noticed a lot of changes in master branches regarding
the use of Unicode typography. GNOME HIG has recommendations for
English:

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/typography.html

I have been submitting patches for implementing these recommendations
in the original strings:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=772263

This is a great opportunity to improve our translations! For example,
I have been using ASCII typography (characters you can input with your
keyboard: " ", ..., - etc.) in Polish translations for years. This is
actually incorrect, and for some time now I use proper Unicode
characters that the language's rules dictate: „ ”, …, — etc.

It is slightly more work for me, sure, but as HIG puts it, it
drastically improves the impression given by your applications. I
believe some copy and pasting is worth the effort. Here is some info
on other ways to input Unicode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input#In_X11_.28Linux_and_other_Unix_variants.29

Naturally, every language has different typography rules. I encourage
you to look into your language's and consider the change.

As a final note, I don't believe there are any technical reasons to
avoid Unicode these days, so you shouldn't worry about that. If an app
crashes because of UTF-8, then it is a bug that needs to be reported
and fixed.

Best regards,

-- 
Piotr Drąg
https://piotrdrag.fedorapeople.org