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

[Michael Kerrisk]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Personally, I would prefer that quotes render sensibly in utf8, html
>> and dvi, and that correctly written man pages do not need any
>> modification.  Also, the use of `foo' is very convenient (even if it
>> no longer appears balanced in the source).
>
> Let me try to summarize:
>
>  . What people like to input in man pages is this:
>
>      `foo' should be equal to \[oq]foo\[cq]
>
>      \`foo\' should be equal to <ASCII 0x60>foo<ASCII 0x27>
>
>    I say `in man pages' because \` and \' act as accents too, but
>    this is, AFAIK, not used (a quick search in the man pages on my
>    SuSE GNU/Linux box showed not a single man file which uses \' or
>    \` as an accent).
>
>  . Depending on the output device, ` and ' should be mapped to
>    different characters.  However, \` and \' should always map to
>    ASCII 0x60 and ASCII 0x27 for proper cut and paste support.
>
> Do you all agree with this?

This all sounds reasonable.  If needed I will adapt the 800 or so
(Section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7) pages in man-pages to whatever input form is
needed (provded it is not a heavy form -- e.g., not troff
conditionals), so long as I can get what I consider to be decent
*output*.  That is, balanced single quotes in ASCII (that probably
means the equivalent of \(aq...\(aq ), and balanced quotes in UTF-8
(as can currently be obtained by `...').

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html