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

[brian m. carlson]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 11:05:05AM +0200, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
> 2) Using the form
> `x'
> is rendered nicely by groff for UTF-8 (proper opening and closing
> single quotes), but looks ugly in ASCII, since ` and ' are not
> visually balanced.  (I see that this usage is common, and wonder
> whether it rendered differently for ASCII in historical roff systems?)

This is correct.  troff maps ` to an opening single quotation mark (‘),
and ' to a closing single quotation mark (’).  Use the -Tps option to
man and look at the result, if you don't believe me.  The fact that they
look ugly in ASCII is a function of your font and the fact that ASCII
cannot properly represent even standard English text.

> The definition of ' in groff(7) as I have it here is wrong:
> it says "apostrophe, right quotation mark, single quote",
> but "right quotation mark" is entirely wrong, as Markus Kuhn documented.
> So, ' is *not* right quotation mark, and if groff today shows it as one,
> then this bug will be fixed next week or next year.

Markus Kuhn discusses the usage of the proper characters when using
Unicode.  The Unicode U+0027 (') is not appropriate as a quotation mark,
I agree.  However, when groff typesets a document, it translates ' to ’.
If an ASCII output device is present, ’ is replaced by ', since ASCII is
obviously lacking the correct character.  This is an unfortunate
limitation of ASCII, and since UTF-8 is firmly entrenched as *the*
standard character encoding, the limitations of plain ASCII become less
and less relevant.

> I'd appreciate some input on what the best solution is (which of
> course might be something other than one of the solutions above).

My suggestion, in case it wasn't apparent already, is to use the `' pair
in the source which will be mapped onto ‘’ in UTF-8 output, and to give
up on anything approaching decent output in ASCII.

--
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only
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