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


From: Ralph Corderoy
Subject: Re: [Groff] Getting properly rendered single quotes in groff
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:06:35 +0100

Hi Werner,

> > Yeah, I think that's what's needed.  Debian does tr \[oq] ' (only)
> > and I'm not sure if that's also be needed.  For latin1, it might be
> > nicer to keep ` as it is, and instead map ' and \[cq] to an acute
> > accent.
> 
> Well, since it is often the case that man pages cite shell input code
> like
> 
>   $ grep foo `find -name 'xxx.*'`
> 
> it is quite important IMHO to have proper cut and paste from a man
> page displayed in a terminal.

Agreed.

> With other words: Within normal text, it's probably best to use \[oq]
> and \[cq], and within verbatim code fragments, plain ' and ` should be
> used as-is.

It's horrible for an author to have to use character escapes instead of
the glyphs readily available on the keyboard for normal text;  it
interrupts the flow of typing.  Surely the solution should allow the
`normal' entry of quotes in this case.  Since any code extracts, C,
shell, etc., often already need manipulation, perhaps because they
contain the escape character, it's these that should use \` and \', e.g.

    $ grep \'foo\\.bar\' \`find -name \'xxx.*\'\`

This is all existing standard practice as I understand it, and has been
since the year dot.  So to flip it around seems wrong.

That just leaves getting grotty to output ' for ` if \*(.T is ascii by
doing .tr `' as you suggested.  As Stuart says, this doesn't seem -man
specific.  Is tty.tmac the place for this?  With the change in glyph
appearance, perhaps troff needs to change too?

Cheers,


Ralph.





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