Hi Stuart, > > So it seems clear that man pages should use \` or its verbose \(ga > > equivalent when they mean a shell backtick operator, ASCII character > > 96. > > Seeing as \` has been there since the early days, and assuming that > there aren't too many instances that need correcting, rendering ` > ("open quote") as ' (neutral quote mark) in non-UTF-8 environments now > seems at least conceivable.
And this would be done in, e.g. -Tascii, because most fonts don't have nicely balanced-looking `' glyphs. Just to double-check, a lot's been said. > FWIW, section 2.1 of CSTR #54 sheds some light on this -- troff did > indeed use ` and ' as opening/closing quotes, and \` and \' for the > plain ` and ' ASCII characters. When ' changed so that it no longer > mirrored `, a decision had to be made on whether \' should yield an > apostrophe or an acute accent. I don't see how you get that last sentence from 2.1. When the appearance of ' changed over time, there wasn't any decision, things were just left alone I'd have thought. > Producing an apostrophe would be best where \' was used (for a literal > ASCII single quote), and producing an acute accent would have been > necessary where overstriking was used to add an acute accent to > another character. CSTR #54 defined \' as an acute accent, equivalent > to \(aa, and that's what groff ended up implementing. I'm not sure that paragraph is correct. Search for `0222' in http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/n1.c.html and you'll see 7th Ed. Unix had those escapes in 1979. Back then, ASCII terminals still had them with a balanced appearance so the change to unbalanced fonts wasn't the motivation. > \(aq then had to be added after \' was changed, to provide a way to > produce an ASCII apostrophe. For the linux man pages, it would seem > reasonable to use \(aq where desired, but for use in other man pages, > that might not be suitable. Where do you see \(aq as desired in the Linux man pages? Only when -Tascii is being used? Does it all boil down to whether -Tascii should map the input `' onto '' these days because fonts have changed? Anyone know why ' changed in fonts to not lean? I remember 'quoting' used to be wrapped in right-leaning apostrophes on both sides at one time on ASCII terminals. Cheers, Ralph.