Single quotation mark vs apostrophy making text input not possible

[paris2020]

Some sentences in newer collections seem to have an error where a single quotation mark is used instead of apostrophy, and therefore text input does not work. When I put in an apostrophy, it is marked as incorrect. Here is one example.

À la fin, tout s’éclaircit.

I tried multiple choice since I could not use text input and you can see that the apostrophy looks different (single closing quotation mark instead of apostrophy as shown in other multiple choice options) This is the second sentence that I have come across with this problem. @mike perhaps this a search for single closing quotation mark would ID all sentences with this problem? [image]

[alanf_us]

It’s not really that text input doesn’t work. It’s that for this sentence, Clozemaster is expecting a curly apostrophe (which you could alternatively call a curly quotation mark), but you’re typing in a straight one. You expect Clozemaster to accept it, but it doesn’t.

Addressing this by forcing all apostrophes to be straight might annoy people who are used to typing curly apostrophes (or who believe that this is more correct). The better fix is for Clozemaster to accept either a straight or a curly apostrophe wherever the sentence has either a straight or a curly apostrophe. It ought to be possible to make this change because in Russian, a change was made at my request to accept the characters е and ё interchangeably (because ё is often used to represent е).

[davidculley]

There are two kinds of apostrophes:

• the proper one which is called the typographic apostrophe ’ (or curly apostrophe)
• the simplified one that most people use which is called the typewriter apostrophe '

The curly apostrophe has been in use for a couple of centuries, to write something like don’t or I’m. It has also been used since hundreds of years as (closing) quotation mark, together with the opening quotation mark ‘.

There are lots of very similar characters with very different meanings (for example, to denote the unit feet, one of which equals 12 inches). When the typewriter was invented, it was impractical (compared to book pressing) to have dozens of keys on the keyboard that all almost look identical. A new, simplified character ' (that everyone uses today) was introduced to cover all the various meanings with just a single key, no matter whether you mean the opening quotation mark ‘ or closing quotation mark ’. This new key was carried over to today’s computer keyboards.

It seems you’re typing the simplified ' when the proper ’ is expected. For a better user experience, Clozemaster could probably be changed to also accept the simplified character, as @alanf_us detailed.

[mike]

Thanks for letting us know! Long term - we’ll aim to support both. Short term - the curly have been updated to simplified. Any other issues please let us know.