Hi Carsten, Carsten Kunze writes: > "Anthony J. Bentley" <anth...@cathet.us> wrote: > > > The below patch causes -mdoc to generate typographic quotes around > > a %T (reference title) instead of straight quotes. > > Maybe that should depend on the output format. ``Example'' does IMHO > look not really goot in the text terminal. Many manpages use these > quote (maybe since they are correct for typeset output) but this > appears ugly to me in the text terminal (the characters are not > symmetrical).
Well, historically fonts displayed ` and ' as symmetrical, but these days they generally don't: ` is grave accent and ' is apostrophe, as opposed to past uses of ' as acute accent or `' as symmetric single quotes. > So would it make sense to leave the straight quotes for typewritten > output and use ``correct'' quotes for typeset output? The case I noticed this in was nroff with a UTF-8 locale. By comparison, Dq encloses in U+201C/U+201D (mandoc/groff) or pairs of U+2018/U+2019 (heirloom). I agree that `` '' makes no sense in modern ASCII; even in an xterm they look unbalanced. " " would probably be a saner ASCII result for Dq, \(lq, \*(Lq, and so forth, but I don't know how complicated a change that would be or if there would be any larger implications to making such a change. I believe the patch in my previous email is the correct behavior for the non-ASCII case though. -- Anthony J. Bentley
