For love (of typography)

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a another true one.) I’m the kind of a strange person who presses ⌥[ and ⇧⌥[ and ⌥] to get to the smart quotes directly from the keyboard. Yeah, I’m doing it right now. Yeah, it’s awkward. Yeah, I know that these days a lot of software automatically introduces curly quotes for you – I even wrote some of that software myself at Medium – but I started doing this in the early 2000s, and you know how motor memory goes: Once it’s all there, it feels so natural there’s no reason to change anything. When the iPhone first came around, it was a similar story. The automatic curly quote routines weren’t there yet, but if you pressed and held the straight quote key, you’d see a little popover, and could move your finger to the proper typographical quote: Yeah, it was awkward. Yeah, I was doing it anyway – slowly at first and then, as my fingers got used to it, more eagerly. At around that time, I began…