PPTools/Ditto

Introduction

Ditto marks, pluralizes as dittos or dittoes, appear frequently in table listings to indicate one row has the same data as the row above.

They are generally proofed as double straight quotes ".

Methods of rendering them when post processing

Straight double quotes

The dittos can be left as straight double quotes UTF-8 code point (U+2032).

Beware when using ppsmq as it will be confused and replace most of them with alternating left and right double curly quotes. That will need to be cleaned up.

Copying preceding data

As there is no type or ink to conserved by using dittos, you may just reproduce the same data for every row in a table.

This has benefits:

• Aligning the data in columns is trivial as it is the same data
• No issues about the dittoed material scrolling off the top of the screen so the reader cannot see it. Typically paper books repeat the data at the beginning of each page so this issue does not exist. In streamed books there are no pages.

This had a down side:

• The electronic book looks different than the original

Double 9 low quotes

A UTF-8 code point of (U+201E) is knownn as a double 9 low quote „.

Double prime

A UTF-8 code point of (U+2032) is known as a double prime ″ .

Ditto

Interestingly, this is Not Recommended.

A UTF-8 code point of U+3003 is known as a ditto.

While this character would seem to be ideal as it is graphically and semantically correct, it has a problem. It is from the Unicode "CJK Symbols and Punctuation" block, and, like all the characters in that block, they're intended for use only with Chinese characters. They will generally render badly in an English text.

It does not display in the (ADE) Adobe ebook reader at all.

Background

There was some discussion of this in the forums around here: https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15019&start=22110

External Resource

https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=%22&r=None shows a list of "confusable" characters that look like double quotes.