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

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Keith Marshall writes:
> On 06/11/14 12:30, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> > By ASCII I meant specifically ASCII output. I use UTF-8 terminals and
> > the patch was intended to improve how the nroff output looks in that case.
> 
> That you use UTF-8 terminals is completely irrelevant; you are confusing
> two distinct concepts here

I appreciate what you're saying, but I was not confused in this respect.

> -- a character encoding (UTF-8), and the
> *font* used for display.  No matter that the encoding is UTF-8,
> depending on configured choice of font, your "typographic" quotes may
> look nicely balanced, or horrendously ghastly; what looks nice to you
> may look hideous to others, with a different font configuration.

This is technically correct, but just as irrelevant. Given UTF-8 output,
mdoc *already* uses U+201C/U+201C for double quotes except in the case
of Qq/Qo/Qc (where it must use straight quotes by definition), \(dq
(ditto), and %T, and maybe a few more low-level roff cases I don't know
about. This patch only makes nroff be more consistent. That's what I
meant by saying "to improve how the nroff output looks."

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley