Typographic apostrophes in emails sometimes fail to render

[dnywh]

We use proper typographic apostrophes in text rather than the commonly-misused single straight quote symbol. If you don't know what this means, skim over this article.

HTML implementation in modern browsers handles this without a hitch. Email HTML, on the other hand, is a bit funny. Some apostrophes ( ’) are substituted with three U+FFFD � replacement characters, like ���.

It seems to be luck of the draw: only some email renderings/instances include the ��� replacement for the ’ symbol. Consider the first issue of the newsletter. Here’s what most people got:

And here’s what Mike got:

Hypotheses

Copying text from Figma causes the issue

I’ve noticed (anecdotally) that text that I write out manually never has this issue, but text that copy and paste from Figma sometimes does. Perhaps there’s some funny, invisible, encoding that happens here? I’ve fixed this before (in email preview text) by re-writing it manually.

And I actually caught this exact problematic instance during development of the email. There are so many instances of an apostrophe throughout the email. So that lends credence to this one having something funky about it rather than it being luck of the draw.

Then again, I rewrote that bit manually (I think) and it didn’t fix the issue.

It’s just bad practice to use apostrophes inline

Maybe I’m reading too much in to the swap-out being in the same we’re word. It could just be coincidence, and that I should do other things to avoid the possibility of this error, like escaping any future apostrophes in email HTML with ’ or the <q> element.

[dnywh]

Here’s that error message that I get when sometimes copying text over from Figma. It's probably from the line breaks: