If I want to typeset a sentence like
Larry B. challenged Michael J.'s record.
I end up with the apostrophe displaying as an opening single quote (like a 6, rather than a 9).
Is there a way to avoid this happening, and/or give Typst some extra information that in English it would rarely or never be the case that you’d want a full-stop immediately followed by an opening quotation mark?
Thanks for this, and I can see that I could include #sym.quote.r.single; as a workaround.
However, I am a little concerned as I try to convince people that Typst is a straightforward system to use that they might baulk at having to include such a convoluted expression in the middle of a word.
Additionally, I cannot quite understand why the default behaviour of Typst wouldn’t be to convert a single quotation mark into an apostrophe when it immediately follows a full stop.
Indeed it’s known that the smartquote algorithm is not smart enough, see Smartquote incorrectly renders quote direction · Issue #7615 · typst/typst · GitHub
Note that you can wite \' to insert a non-smart single quote, or add #set smartquote(enabled: false) to do that globally, but then you don’t get the nice typographically correct character.
If you do want a nice apostrophe, you can write ’ directly in the Typst file (for example using a special keyboard key combination), or you can define #let apostrophe = sym.quote.r.single or #let apostrophe = "’" and use that variable where you need it. (If you’d like to have sym.apostrophe as an alias for sym.quote.r.single you can file an issue in the codex project.)