Re: [Groff] Getting properly rendered single quotes in groff

[Stuart Brady]

Hi Ralph,

> So it seems clear that man pages should use \` or its verbose \(ga
> equivalent when they mean a shell backtick operator, ASCII character 96.

Hmm, that's interesting.

Seeing as \` has been there since the early days, and assuming that
there aren't too many instances that need correcting, rendering `
("open quote") as ' (neutral quote mark) in non-UTF-8 environments now
seems at least conceivable.

If anyone can see a better option, which doesn't require updating every
man page ever written, please speak up!

FWIW, section 2.1 of CSTR #54 sheds some light on this -- troff did
indeed use ` and ' as opening/closing quotes, and \` and \' for the
plain ` and ' ASCII characters.  When ' changed so that it no longer
mirrored `, a decision had to be made on whether \' should yield an
apostrophe or an acute accent.

Producing an apostrophe would be best where \' was used (for a literal
ASCII single quote), and producing an acute accent would have been
necessary where overstriking was used to add an acute accent to another
character.  CSTR #54 defined \' as an acute accent, equivalent to \(aa,
and that's what groff ended up implementing.

\(aq then had to be added after \' was changed, to provide a way to
produce an ASCII apostrophe.  For the linux man pages, it would seem
reasonable to use \(aq where desired, but for use in other man pages,
that might not be suitable.

Cheers,
-- 
Stuart Brady