Foot And Inch Marks - Butterick's Practical Typography

foot and inch marksUse straight quotes, not curly

Foot and inch marks—also known as minute and sec­ond marks or prime and dou­ble prime marks, de­pend­ing on what they’re la­bel­ing—are not curly. Use straight quotes for these marks.

Windows	Mac OS	HTML
'	foot mark	'	'	'
"	inch mark	"	"	"

“But back in straight and curly quotes, you told me to turn on smart quotes. So now, when I try to type foot and inch marks, they come out curly, not straight.” A fair point.

How to override smart quotes

WordType the foot or inch mark, which will come out curly, and then press the key com­mand for Undo. The curly mark will be­come straight.

PagesSame as Word—type the foot or inch mark, which will come out curly, and then press ⌘ + Z for Undo.

HTMLUse the ex­plicit code for the sin­gle straight quote (') and dou­ble straight quote (" or ")

The same sym­bols are used to de­note ar­cmin­utes (= 1/60th of a ra­dial de­gree) and arc­sec­onds (= 1/60th of an arc­min­ute). See screen-read­ing con­sid­er­a­tions for how the arc­min­ute in­flu­ences typography.

Ty­pog­ra­phy purists would point out that proper foot and inch marks have a slight north­east-to-south­west slope to them. HTML purists would fur­ther point out that these char­ac­ters have their own es­cape codes (′ and ″). True, and you are wel­come to seek them out.

–118° 19′ 36.9″

purity

What you will find is that even though these char­ac­ters are avail­able in sys­tem fonts, they are less com­mon in pro­fes­sional fonts (found in font rec­om­men­da­tions). So as a rule, straight quotes are the most re­li­able tools for the job.

–118° 19’ 36.9”	wrong
–118° 19' 36.9"	close enough

You can ital­i­cize the straight quotes if you want an even bet­ter ap­prox­i­ma­tion of sloped foot and inch marks.

–118° 19' 36.9"

bonus points

Tread care­fully if foot and inch marks ap­pear within quoted material.

“She’s 6’ 10”.”	wrong
"She's 6’ 10”."	hopeless
“She’s 6' 10".”	right

by the way

• Why would pro­fes­sional fonts omit these char­ac­ters? Foot and inch marks have never had a di­rect key short­cut on ei­ther Mac or Win­dows, nor have they been part of any stan­dard char­ac­ter-set spec­i­fi­ca­tion, so they have gone ob­scure in the dig­i­tal era. But they are start­ing to reappear.

• If you’re a purist whose cho­sen font is miss­ing true foot and inch marks, there’s noth­ing wrong with us­ing the marks from a dif­fer­ent font. Match the height and weight as best you can. No one will know.

• A non­break­ing space in the mid­dle of a foot-and-inch mea­sure­ment will pre­vent an awk­ward line­break like 6'10", and en­sure that you get 6' 10".

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