The left single quotation mark has been used as an acceptable approximation to the ʻokina, though it still has problems: the ʻokina is a letter, not a punctuation mark, which may cause incorrect behaviour in automated text processing. Many other character sets expanded on the overloaded ASCII apostrophe, providing distinct characters for the left and right single quotation marks.

In some fonts, the ASCII apostrophe is rendered as a right single quotation mark, which is an even less satisfactory glyph for the ʻokina-essentially a 180° rotation of the correct shape. This character is typically rendered as a straight typewriter apostrophe, lacking the curve of the ʻokina proper. In the ASCII character set, the ʻokina is typically represented by the apostrophe character ('), ASCII value 39 in decimal and 27 in hexadecimal. Computer encoding Apostrophes and quotation marks Colloquially and formally, the forms have long been used interchangeably. The United States Board on Geographic Names lists relevant place names both with and without the ʻokina and kahakō (macron) in the Geographic Names Information System. For words that begin with an ʻokina, capitalization rules affect the next letter instead: for instance, at the beginning of a sentence, the name of the letter is written 'ʻOkina', with a capital O. It is unicameral-that is, it does not have separate uppercase (capital or majuscule) and lowercase (small or minuscule) forms-unlike the other letters, all of which are basic Latin letters. The ʻokina is treated as a separate letter in the Hawaiian alphabet. The Tahitian ʻeta has a distinct shape, like an ʻokina turned 90° or more clockwise. The ʻokina visually resembles a left single quotation mark (‘)-a small '6'-shaped mark above the baseline.

No official or traditional status may use ' or ‘ or ’ or nothing No official or traditional status may use ' or ‘ or ’ Use of the apostrophe and macron diacritics in Samoan words was readopted by the Ministry of Education in 2012 after having been abandoned in the 1960s. Often replaced by an apostrophe in modern publications, recognized by Samoan scholars and the wider community. 'Inverted comma'-inverted ( liliu) comma ( koma) The ʻokina has historically been represented in computer publications by the grave accent (`), the left single quotation mark (‘), or the apostrophe ('), especially when the correct typographical mark (ʻ) is not available.

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