Use true primes or double primes for foot and inch marks. Not quotation marks. Not the up-and-down primes you get with the control key. I use the Universal News + Commercial Pi font.

Hit 8 for single prime. Hit 9 for double.

They look so much better than the others. I'm sure other typographers have other ways to do this.

good luck.

powers

There's got to be a way to do this without having a special font. Anyone else?

They are in the basic Symbol font which comes with the OS.

Nowadays, some foundries are putting these characters in their OpenType fonts.
I am, but haven't released any yet.

So you would use the glyph palette to set them.

You could cheat by using the "hungarian umlaut" -- a double-acute accent, which might do the job depending on the font, and which is easily accessible with option-shift-g.

In ID3 just hold down Alt instead of Ctrl. But as others have pointed out, that doesn't produce true inch marks, it's just a convenient way to get non-curly quotes.

True primes can be found at Unicode U+2032 and U+2033. They're under the Punctuation category in ID's glyph palette.

Ah! Thanks Nick, that's what I needed!

As has been mentioned, most fonts don't come with U+2032 and U+2033.

But . . .

When making these up for a font that lacks them, skewing a "quotesingle" works about as well as rotating it -- better in some ways, worse in others. I tend to use a little of both. So, in InDesign, you could set the quotesingle & then just slant it about 15 degrees for a reasonable prime/minute/foot. And of course, the quotedbl for minute/inch.

FWIW

Charles, let's hope Thomas, John or Adam don't see this thread, or we could be in big trouble...