The GNU utilities frequently use the ASCII characters 0x27 (') and 0x60
(`) together as symmetric directional quotation marks. Many modern fonts
however follow the ISO and Unicode standards and show 0x27 (') as a
neutral vertical quotation mark, while 0x60 (`) is a grave accent. This
has been the case for a long time under Apple and Microsoft operating
systems with Truetype fonts and is also going to become common practice
soon under XFree86 4.0 (with the new TrueType and Unicode font support)
and therefore many GNU/Linux systems.
It would therefore look better on more platforms and terminal emulators,
if the GNU file utilities wrote 'quote' instead of `quote' in their
output. Typographically proper directional quotation marks (and many
other good things) will become available again as GNU moves towards
supporting Unicode and UTF-8. The ASCII grave accent should not be
abused as a left quotation mark, because it don't look like one in many
Latin-1 and Unicode fonts and it isn't supposed to look like one by the
standards.
$ ln --abc
ln: unrecognized option `--abc'
Try `ln --help' for more information.
For more detailed background information on this problem, please have a
look at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
Thanks.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
