I ask the question out of interest.
Below is an example from a list of tags. It seems that colons take precedence over apostrophes, which is counter to their respective ASCII character’s order.
I’ve also read that with Qt (the Scrivener for Windows framework) rules, apostrophes are treated as ignorable or low-weight punctuation, whereas colons have higher punctuation weight.
This is the way the Mac sorts these as well. I would speculate the choice has less to do with character encoding and more to do with grammar. The apostrophe isn’t a clause separator, so the last three in the list are all one phrase, whereas the first three are compound statements, where the first part of that is a single word. Or to put it another way, we would expect “byleman” to sort above “byleman’s” in other cases, and that is essentially what is happening here.
Thanks. The explanation makes a lot of sense.
