Re: [PATCH v3 07/13] libc.7: ffix

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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Hi Alex,

At 2023-01-06T00:53:11+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On 1/5/23 23:53, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > * Set page topic in lowercase.
> > * Use typographer's quotation marks instead of '"' for quotation.
> 
> Isn't it equivalent in running text?  '"' is simpler to type.

No, it's not equivalent anywhere except on the "ascii", "latin1", and
"cp1047" output devices.

$ groff -man -Tpdf <<EOF > quote.pdf
.TH foo 1 2023-01-05 "groff test suite"
.SH Name
foo \- "frobnicate" a \(lqbar\(rq
EOF
$ evince quote.pdf

It _is_ simpler to type just ", and many other man page authors seem to
have found it so.  That is why I have proposed a `Q` quotation macro,
because without it, man page authors seem to forego quotation entirely
in favor of italics, bold, or nothing.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-12/msg00078.html

Historically, TeX-style quotation ``like this'' has been seen in *roff
documents, but the practice is almost nonexistent in the Linux man-pages
corpus.

``This'' is so ugly on ISO 8859 and later character set-based terminals
that I don't wonder why people avoid it.

https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n411.pdf

...is a copy of part 1 of ECMA-94, the gratis equivalent of ISO 8859,
and shows what the ' and ` glyphs are supposed to look like.

Regards,
Branden

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