Re: [groff] [patch] modernize -T ascii rendering of opening single quote

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> By contrast, 80 pages contained ` (0x60) used as a left quote, usually
> paired with ' (0x27) but (surprisingly) sometimes with \(aq.

Here, cvs(1) is one page that does that a lot.

    $ zgrep -om3 '`.*aq' cvs.1.gz
    `Invoking CVS\(aq
    `Global options\(aq
    `Password authentication server\(aq
    $

Its source starts

    .\" This is the man page for CVS.  It is auto-generated from the
    .\" cvs.man.header, cvs.texinfo, & cvs.man.footer files.  Please make 
changes
    .\" there.  A full copyright & license notice may also be found in 
cvs.texinfo.

It looks like a Perl script does the s/'/\\(aq/g.
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/cvs/ccvs/doc/mkman.pl?revision=1.6&view=markup

> Although it might help to render \(oq as ' on man pages, it would be
> wrong to render 0x60 that way, lest examples in which the distinction
> matters be mutilated.

When looking at groff_char(7) the other day before replying, I saw
things like

    '  the ISO latin1 ‘Apostrophe’ (code 39) prints as ', a right
       single quotation mark; the original character can be obtained
       with ‘\(aq’.

    '    \[aa]   acute          u0301 (u00B4)   acute accent
    `    \[ga]   grave          u0300 (u0060)   grave accent

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.