Capital opening quotation marks

[Dave Keenan]

It has sometimes bothered me that when you start a sentence with a quote that does not and should not itself begin with an upper-case letter, then one is forced to choose between failing to begin one's sentence with a capital letter or being unfaithful to the original being quoted. The usual advice is to find some way to avoid beginning the sentence with the quote.

But it occurred to me one day that it is the opening quotation mark that begins the sentence, so it is the opening quotation mark that should be capitalised.

As a form of procrastination I developed the following BBCode to capitalise any quotation mark by rotating a copy of it 180° and placing it below and in contact with the original (or slightly overlapping). This can now be done by enclosing the quotation mark in [cq]...[/cq], short for "capital quote".

Here are some examples of lowercase and uppercase, straight and curly open-quotes, in the default forum font, then Times, Helvetica and Courier, all at size=150. Unfortunately, what you see will depend on your browser and platform. I'm using Firefox on Windows 11.

"x ""x “x ““x “x ““x
"x ""x “x ““x
"x ""x “x ““x
"x ""x “x ““x

We can improve that last Courier example by reducing the vertical offset from its default 50 using [cq=42]“[/cq] to give ““x

We can improve the curly Times example (at least in my browser) by increasing the vertical offset using [cq=60]“[/cq] to give ““x

Of course this is way too much trouble to go to in real life. But I thought it was bit of fun.

Here's the BBCode definition:

BBCode pattern: [cq={RANGE=0,100;defaultValue=50}]{TEXT}[/cq]
HTML replacement: <span style="display: inline-block; position: relative;">{TEXT}<span style="display: inline-block; position: absolute; left: 0; transform: translateY({RANGE}%) translateY(-1.9ex) rotate(180deg);">{TEXT}</span></span>

Help line: Capitalise quotation mark: [cq]"[/cq] or [cq=40]"[/cq] to adjust the downward offset (default 50)

[רועיסיני]

Interesting. I note that in Chromium browsers (or at least in Brave) on my Ubuntu laptop the curly Times one you said was bad was actually the only one that had the quotation marks joined (which I assume is what you intended from looking in firefox), and the "improvement" ruined it here. However on my Android phone the corrected example looks better than the original but in the default font the marks are still disconnected.