Re: [Groff] Getting properly rendered single quotes in groff

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi again Stuart,

I wrote:
> So it seems clear that man pages should use \` or its verbose \(ga
> equivalent when they mean a shell backtick operator, ASCII character
> 96.

Interestingly, this is the opposite to the ", \(lq, and \(rq characters.
With these, the one for pasting into the shell is the simple " and if
you want the typographically orientated ones, you use \(lq and \(rq.

I guess it's like this because keyboards offer `, ', and " characters so
troff makes it easy to enter sexy single quotes and sexless double
quotes.

On a related note, although I've seen doubling up of ` and ' to give ``
and '', like TeX IIRC, they don't produce the same output as using \(lq
and \(rq so I guess they're not the right way to do that.

Cheers,


Ralph.