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

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

Dave Kemper wrote on Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 02:47:50PM -0500:
> On 4/29/17, G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden> wrote:
>> At 2017-04-29T15:40:06+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

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

>> I don't interpret it that way.

> Nor I.

I stand corrected.  As was pointed out to me by three people,
I misread both manual pages.

FYI, i submitted a patch adding a brief sentence to groff_char(7)
making it less likely that others misunderstand it the the same
way, also improving a few other aspects in the vicinity, and Carsten
Kunze promptly checked and committed the patch (thanks for that).

Yours,
  Ingo


P.S.

> On 4/29/17, Anthony J. Bentley <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both
>> right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section
>> of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6.

> Yes, and that remains a bad decision, because it conflates two
> distinct marks of punctuation that have vastly different semantic
> meanings, disallows automated checking for balanced quotation marks,
> and causes other problems eloquently described in:
> 
> https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/

After reading that and a few of the documents referenced from the
comments, the question what Unicode should do seems complicated to
me, in particular when intending to accomodate different languages
and different times, and i don't think i should try to comment on
whether Unicode ought to be amended in this respect.

At least it is clear that using U+2019 for the apostrophe in English
words is not unusual and that the "'" groff input character is a
normal way to achieve that, so the current version of groff_char(7)
accurately describes the current state of affairs.  Whether that
ought to be changed is another matter.