David Combs wrote:

The summation sign “∑” in my sig is my and my website signet.

in the end of my sig, there's this character “☄” (unicode name
“comet”). It is there so that it forces groups.google.com and Apple
Mail application into sending the message with unicode encoding.
Otherwise, the heuristics'll typically pick Japanese encoding. (in
google groups, last i checked about last year there's no way to set
encoding. And in Apple Mail 2 years ago, there's no unicode encoding
option... it is added now but last i checked there's no preference
that can set encoding ... )

My use of curly quotes “ ” or other unicode chars are just convenience
and practical need. I have in my emacs various easy ways to type them.
The need to quote is for example, seen throughout gnu's docs, but they
used a ascii cludge of backtick for left curly single quote and
straight quote for right curly single quote, e.g. “`something'”.
(quoting is needed for highlighting purporses or to make a phrase's
semantic from normal interpretation in the sentence.)

Since about 2006, i find emacs's support of unicode very roburst and i
have no problem with these and other mathematical chars or chinese in
emacs. In general, opensource langs and tools in e.g. linux world has
much caught on and support unicode, and i think that is good.
(commercial world long ago supported and use these chars in practice
(e.g. Apple in early 1990s and Microsoft Windows since about WindowsNT
4 or Windows2000)) The OpenSource world typically has a lag of 5 to 10
years in catching up most desktop techs. Even today, there are still a
few cave dwelling tech geekers you'll see occationally complaint about
unicode in posts (e.g. Alan M here insists that newsgroup posts should
be in ascii only!). But thankfully these days you'll often see others
tech geekers follow up chiding about the complainer like “dude, get a
proper newsreader” ...

You FreeSoftware and OpenSource supporters really should move on and
embrace unicode.

I have made few suggestions here and elsewhere in the past 2 years
including several private exchanges with Richard Stallman, about
updating emacs doc (and in general all GNU docs convention) to to use
“” and ‘’ in place of painful and ugly and technically problematic and
ambiguous ascii kludge `', among few other modernization issues... but
in general it's met with extreme difficulty...

i've been wanting to file a emacs bug report on this particular
issue ... but with so many resistance and my “troll” persona etc ...
basically it's very disencouraging ...

The problem with `' or ``'' is that:

• it's just 1980's ascii kludge to get around the fact there were no
matching quotes in ascii. In some technical sense, it's misuse and
abuse of symbols.
• it's ugly.
• it's ambiguous. The straight quote has many meanings, and both
straight quote and backtick also has special meanings in elisp lang
and in function's inline doc string.
• it is not possible to do a syntactical parse. (compare it to quoting
with chars that are matching pairs.)

If you think there's some merit in this suggestion, please file a bug
report. (menu “Help‣Send Bug Report...”)

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄