Re: [Groff] Rendering \(oq in ASCII and ISO 8859-1

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 11:09:59PM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > It is quite easy to write a small macro package (to be loaded
> > > after all other macro packages or to be put into troffrc-end)
> > > which translate "`" to "'" if wished, but I don't like this as the
> > > default for groff.
> > 
> > Well, I think this is a shame for the sake of quality output with
> > modern X fonts,
> 
> What exactly is a `shame'?

Quotes being displayed like this:

  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/groff-quotes.png

> It's not clear to me how the `official' groff handling should affect
> Debian.  It's really easy to have a Debian `man-local' and
> `mdoc-local' which do
> 
>   .if n \
>   .  if !'\*[.T]'utf8' \
>   .    tr \[oq]'
> 
> or something similar and you get what you want.

I don't want output with Debian's groff to differ from that produced by
"official" groff (extra Japanese support notwithstanding), as it will
not always be used purely for display purposes. Site administrators can
of course do what they like, so I'll prepare an example like yours.

> > but I'm unwilling to make Debian's groff package produce different
> > output from official groff.
> 
> Maybe this is something for the `man' maintainer.

That is me. :) It's possible for man to kludge up a substitution, that's
true.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  address@hidden