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

[Stuart Brady]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 03:06:35PM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 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.

Those are certainly my sentiments.

> 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.*\'\`

Agreed -- except that \' won't work -- you need \(aq, because \' renders
to an acute accent -- but this did originally work for older troff, when
the apostrophe and acute accent were one and the same.

Out of curiosity, is there a decent way to define \(aq to ' in a man
page, provided something other than groff is rendering the page?

Cheers,
-- 
Stuart Brady