Re: [Groff] Escaping punctuation marks in troff

[Robert Goulding]

On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 01:06 PM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> See section 7.3 in CSTR #54 for a precise explanation.
>
>     http://troff.org/papers.html
>
> The quotes need `doubleling'.  Taking your example text:
>
>     $ cat 158.2.octet-stream
>     abc
>     .ip simple
>     def
>     .ip " she said " Hello world !" to me "
>     ghi
>     .ip " she said "" Hello world !"" to me "
>     xyz
>     $ nroff -me 158.2.octet-stream | grep .
>     abc
>     simple
>          def
>      she said
>          ghi
>      she said " Hello world !" to me
>          xyz
Though if you want the output to look *nice*, you should use proper 
typographical quotes; either

.ip " she said \[lq]Hello World!\[rq] to me"

or, as a close  approximation,

.ip " she said ``Hello World!'' to me"

where the closing double quotes after the exclamation mark are a pair 
of single apostrophes (').

Robert.