Re: [Groff] Using \(aq in plain English words--bad idea?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 08:32:57AM -0400:

> I'm noticing that in some of groff's own man pages, the plain-old
> long-suffering apostrophe is explcitly avoided in favor of \(aq.
> 
> And I don't mean in any fancy technical jargon, I mean in plain
> language like:
> 
> Don\(aqt listen to Trump\(aqs advisors.
> 
> That sure is ugly, and unkind to spell-checkers.  Is this a recommended
> style?

 $ man groff_char
[...]
REFERENCE
[...]
   7-bit Character Codes 32-126
[...]
   '  the ISO latin1 `Apostrophe' (code 39) prints as ', a right
      single quotation mark; the original character can be obtained
      with `\(aq'.

 $ man mandoc_char
[...]
DESCRIPTION
[...]
   Accents
     In output modes supporting such special output characters, for
     example -T pdf, some roff(7) formatters convert the following
     ASCII input characters to the following Unicode special output
     characters:

        `      U+2018   left single quotation mark
        '      U+2019   right single quotation mark
        ~      U+02DC   small tilde

     In prose, this automatic substitution is often desirable; but
     when these characters have to be displayed as plain ASCII
     characters, for example in source code samples, they require
     escaping to render as follows:

        \(ga   U+0060   grave accent
        \(aq   U+0027   apostrophe
        \(ti   U+007E   tilde

So yes, documentation kind of recommends "Don\(aqt listen".

Arguably, apostrophes are at least as common in english prose
as single quotes, so the decision to make single quotes easier
to type at the expense of making apostophes harder to type
could have been questioned.  But that decision was made a very
long time ago, and changing it now might break large numbers of
non-manual documents.

Right now, mandoc does not do these substitutions, not even in
-Tutf8 output mode, which could maybe be considered a bug.
Or maybe not, since most manual page authors probably
write "don't", and those who really care will probably use
the more explicit \(oq\(cq for single quotes rather than `'.

> If the page author absolutely hates directional single quotes
> used as apostrophes, wouldn't it be better to do something like
> 
> .tr '\[aq]
> 
> near the top of the document?

That would break the rendering of quotes similar to the following:

Golding wrote: \[lq]`They\[aq]re all dead,' said Piggy, `an\[aq]
this is an island.  Nobody don\[aq]t know we\[aq]re here.'\[rq]

Yours,
  Ingo