Chris, can you provide an example? What Unicode codepoint is being used in this situation?

John, tonos 0384. Here is image:

Just the tonos following the tau in the position and use of an apostrophe--ignore the cap Etatonos

Interesting. I thought the Greek apostrophe was supposed to look like the smooth breathing mark, which is superficially similar to the Latin apostrophe but with enough differences in shape, size, and position not to be mistaken for it. Since monotonic orthography no longer uses the smooth breathing mark, maybe the reasoning is that the tonos should take over the role as the template for what the Greek apostrophe should look like. Or it could be a lazy mistake.

In most printed Greek I see these days, the Latin apostrophe is used. Whether this is just a case of keyboard or glyph limitations or a conscious choice of the type compositor, I do not know.

Chris, how did you determine what character is being used here? Can you post the actual text string, so I can analyse it?

John,

I selected the glyph in InDesign with the Glyph palette open and set to "current selection". When you hover your mouse over the glyph, the unicode pops up.

άρθρων κατ΄ Έτος.

ϗ΄ is also often found.

From another source, the same word uses the expected apostrophe as seen here: "κατ’ άρθρο"

.

I am quite sure the user typed the glyph, I only changed the font. My assumption is that this person was accustomed to typing this way as a habit. The text is in my previous post.

Okay, this is interesting. The 'Unicode Data' provided by InDesign is misleading, if that is truly associated with the sign following the tau.

U+0384 is not the COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. U+0384 is the spacing GREEK TONOS character, which was encoded for backwards compatibility purposes to enable encoding of uppercase diacritics by entering the spacing tonos before the capital, e.g. ΄E. [This encoding is not encouraged.]

Now, U+0384 has a compatibility decomposition to 0020 0301, i.e. the space character followed by a combing acute accent. So it is possible that InDesign is reporting Unicode Data for this decomposition, which is why you are seeing it reported as COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT (U+0301).

As to how this ended up in the text, it seems likely that some Greek users mistype the spacing tonos instead of the apostrophe in the same way that some English users type ` instead of '.

"the same way that some English users type ` instead of '."

That is what I thought, too. Thanks, John!