Re: FAMILY-dependent apostrophe behaviour with -mom

[Marc Simpson]

Hi Dale,

Thanks for your reply.

On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 12:06 AM Dale Snell <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 11:09 AM Marc Simpson <address@hidden> wrote:
> ...
> > I've noticed a difference in the typesetting of apostrophes depending
> > on selected font family with groff -mom.  [...]
>
> I had the same problem some months back.  I posted some messages
> here about it, though I don't remember the dates.
>
> Question:  How are you running Groff?  I was using pdfmom to build
> my PDFs, and wound up with typewriter apostrophes in my PDF
> output.

I was doing the same: pdfmom.

> However, on a whim, I changed to pdfroff, and suddenly it
> all worked correctly.

Interesting: I see the same result change here; both

$ pdfmom ...
$ groff -Tpdf ...

produce the typewriter apostrophe, while pdfroff produces a closing
single quote.

Tracing the execution of pdfroff, I see that it's using -Tps by
default, then converting via ghostscript with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite.

Lo and behold, this produces curly quotes too,

$ groff -Tps -mom ... | ps2pdf - converted.pdf

> So was it something I did, or a bug in
> pdfmom, or groff, or Peter's install-font.sh script, or, or...?

>From the above:  it seems to be related to using the PDF output device
directly?

Unfortunately, going via Postscript means losing hyperlinks in the
table of contents (perhaps there's a way to avoid this; haven't
checked yet.)

> I don't know.  I have a file of personal macros that I include
> when I build anything, and I added the line
>
> .tr '\[cq]
>
> which worked, though .char is probably clearer.  Also, the problem
> is not system-dependent; you're apparently using MacOS, while I'm
> running Fedora 29.

Good to know; thanks.

> Anyway, the workaround for me was to use pdfroff.  The command
> line is quite a bit longer, but since I have Emacs programmed to
> run groff from a single function key, I really don't care.  :-)

As mentioned above, -Tps and a conversion to PDF seem like another
reasonable avenue, though both methods produce slightly different
output to pdfmom.

> Anyway, I hope this helps.

It did, thanks!

I'm still not sure why -Tpdf is producing different output though: bug?

Best,
Marc