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

[Stuart Brady]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 11:30:54AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> It's always used those ASCII characters, 0x60 and 0x27, but the various
> serial terminals I used to use years ago had bitmap fonts that had them
> balanced, i.e. the ' lent to the right at the top.

So, where does that leave us?

` and ' are rendered as opening and closing quote marks on UTF-8.
That would clearly imply that they should be used as such.

\` can be used where a backtick (0x60) is required.  \(aq can be used
where an apostrophe (0x27) is required, but it is groff-specific --
for the linux man pages, hopefully that isn't an issue, but there are
other man pages out there.  BTW, I assume that historically, there was
a difference between using ` and \`, at least with troff?

Michael's complaint is that `, when used as a quote mark, looks ugly
when using non-UTF-8 with modern fonts, and I quite agree.  However,
I'm not sure what can be done to fix this.  Some possible options:

 * Render ` as ' for non-UTF-8 locales.  (Could this be made optional?)
   Any man pages using ` as a backtick and not as a quote mark would be
   broken by this, but on UTF-8, they would need fixing anyway.

 * Render ' as ' (neutral apostrophe/quote) for UTF-8 locales.  Then,
   ' could be used for both opening/closing quotes.  This seems a bit
   extreme, IMO.

 * Work around the problem in the man pages, by using \(aq for all
   quote marks.  There just has to be a better option, though...

 * Anything I've missed?

Cheers,
-- 
Stuart Brady