The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire – a description with usage notes, section 3 The characters grouped by type, with annotations:

Punctuation

The following ISO Latin 1 characters can be classified as punctuation characters:

!exclamation mark
¡inverted exclamation mark
?question mark
¿inverted question mark
"quotation mark
'apostrophe (used as single quote, too)
«left-pointing double angle quotation mark
»right-pointing double angle quotation mark
(left parenthesis
)right parenthesis
[left square bracket
]right square bracket
{left curly bracket
}right curly bracket
,comma
.full stop (period)
:colon
;semicolon
-hyphen-minus
­soft hyphen

For some typographic notes on punctuation characters, see Microsoft's Character design standards - Math symbols for Latin 1.

Punctuation rules

Punctuation rules vary from one language to another. Even within a language, there might be differences in the recommended rules, depending on style and authority. For the English language, the following resources contain well thought-of recommendations:

As regards to some other languages:

Paired punctuation and directionality

The parentheses, brackets and braces, i.e. characters ()[]{}, are classified as "paired punctuation" characters in Unicode. This means that the characters ([{ are regarded as defined logically, as opening punctuation, and the characters )]} correspondingly closing. Thus, although e.g. the name of "(" is "left parenthesis", it is really by definition "opening parenthesis".

This means that if the writing direction is from right to left, as in Hebrew and Arabic, the mirror images of the "normal" glyphs of these characters are used. Thus, a "left parenthesis", "(", would appear as mirrored so that it looks like what we are used to regarding as right parenthess, ")".


Originally created 2000-03-31. Structurally changed 2018-10-16. Minor modifications 2018-12-15.
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