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

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> > Also, there are still fonts in which ASCII 0x27 and 0x60
> > are symmetric (you can also create your own (or remap an
> > existing one) if necessary) which are still useful and
> > convenient for programmers.
> 
> Indeed.  Right now I'm using such a font in Emacs, a 12x24
> bitmap font (Etl-Fixed-Medium).

I'm using my own 6x10 bitmap font, hand-drawn pixel by pixel
in long hours of hard manual labor ;-).  [6x10 means that
you can display *lots* of text on a 1920x1200 display.]

> > Not sure.  The manual clearly states that \' represents an
> > acute accent, which is a glyph very distinct from the ascii
> > quote.
> 
> Please bear in mind that we are talking about man pages, not
> troff documents in general.

I understand.  I'm just unwilling to accept different basic
design principles for every individual device.  Also, when
formatting manual pages with the ps device, it's much better to
use "ascii" quotes from the Courier font than acute and grave
accents from the Times font.  So whatever policy we adopt,
it should be consistent, even if it requires incompatibility
with legacy troff.

> > The only way to get a consistent behavior across all devices
> > would then be to give up on compatibility with AT&T troff,
> > discard the equivalence of \` and \' with grave and acute
> > accent, define two new glyphs "ascii backquote" and "ascii
> > quote" (okay, the latter already exists) and consider these
> > to be equivalent to \` and \'.  The accents will still be
> > accessible as \(ga and \(aa.
> 
> I have no problem with this -- can anyone show me a man page
> which uses \' and \` for accents?

Actually, I believe \` and \' are used extremely seldom in
their role as accents.  If I would ever find it necessary
to use a custom accented character I'd think it's easier to
use .char than to always construct the character everywhere I
need it by manually overstriking a letter with an accent; and
then of course it's practically irrelevant with regard to the
number of required keystrokes whether I use \` and \' or \(ga
and \(aa in the .char request.  Thus, it's perfectly okay for
me if \` and \' change to mean ascii quotes.  But then, please,
in all groff devices, everywhere.  (And we could perhaps also
redefine ~ and ^ to mean asciitilde and asciicircum instead
of tilde accent and circumflex accent.)