At the end of such a sentence, does the single quote come before the punctuation?
If it does not, is a space between the single quotation and double quotation marks necessary?
>>, ' " or '"?
I ask because the publisher's font does not show a space like it seems to here, which looks confusing, so I'm wondering if this is acceptable, or do we just live with the oddity of what appears to be a triple quotation mark)
If the publisher's font has a hair space or a thin space (As would be marked hr# or thin# in the old days when writers used typewriters and then added notes about things their typewriter couldn't do), or perhaps even a six-per-em or four-per-em space, then I would use that.
Otherwise I'd just judge by the font; whether ’” or ’ ” looked closer to the ideal of ’ ” in the given font.
In American usage, a period at the end of a sentence with a nested quote should go inside the innermost quotation marks (see http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/research/puncquotes.html#Comma/Period and http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=2709). The Chicago Manual of Style suggests that it's common typographic practice to insert a thin space between a single quote and a double quote, and that the space should be inserted by the typesetter (if it is not automatically inserted by typesetting software).
