Re: [Groff] [patch] Typographic quotes in -mdoc %T

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Hi Carsten,

Carsten Kunze writes:
> "Anthony J. Bentley" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > The below patch causes -mdoc to generate typographic quotes around
> > a %T (reference title) instead of straight quotes.
> 
> Maybe that should depend on the output format.  ``Example'' does IMHO
> look not really goot in the text terminal.  Many manpages use these
> quote (maybe since they are correct for typeset output) but this
> appears ugly to me in the text terminal (the characters are not
> symmetrical).

Well, historically fonts displayed ` and ' as symmetrical, but these
days they generally don't: ` is grave accent and ' is apostrophe, as
opposed to past uses of ' as acute accent or `' as symmetric single
quotes.

> So would it make sense to leave the straight quotes for typewritten
> output and use ``correct'' quotes for typeset output?

The case I noticed this in was nroff with a UTF-8 locale. By comparison,
Dq encloses in U+201C/U+201D (mandoc/groff) or pairs of U+2018/U+2019
(heirloom).

I agree that `` '' makes no sense in modern ASCII; even in an xterm they
look unbalanced. " " would probably be a saner ASCII result for Dq,
\(lq, \*(Lq, and so forth, but I don't know how complicated a change
that would be or if there would be any larger implications to making
such a change. I believe the patch in my previous email is the correct
behavior for the non-ASCII case though.

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley