The standard ASCII character set is a holdover from the early days of teletype, band printers, computers and manual typewriters. (How many of you have ever seen a band printer? They were incredibly fast.)

If one wants to get nitpicky, typographers have always used the form of characters that was added to the standard ASCII to create the Extended Character set. Even in the days of lead type, most font sets--whether manual or automated linotype--included these typographical characters.

[font="Times New Roman"]

From the standard character set:

This is an apostrophe: ' (ASCII 39)

This is a quotation mark: " (ASCII 34)

From the extended characters set:

This is a left single quotation mark: ‘ (ASCII 145)

This is a right single quotation mark: ’ (ASCII 146)

This is a left double quotation mark: “ (ASCII 147)

This is a right double quotation mark: ” (ASCII 148)

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ASCII 39 and ASCII 34--in typography--would be used to represent minutes and seconds when displaying latitude or longitude or as an abbreviation for feet and inches.

Oh, and since I used the double-hyphen above rather than a true em dash that is cause to differentiate there as well.

[font="Times New Roman"]

This is a hyphen: - (ASCII 45) used as a minus symbol, for compound words, or to break a word between lines.

This is an en dash: – (ASCII 150) used to represent a range such as 1952–1987.

This is an em dash: — (ASCII 151) used as a text separator. This symbol would properly be used in place of the double-hyphen—like this—rather than the double-hyphen typical of computers and typewriters.

And one final typographical note: the ellipsis is typically typed using three periods. But the proper method to display an ellipsis would be to use ASCII char 133: …

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For anyone who really cares about proper typography The Chicago Manual of Style is the editor's Bible.