On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 11:30:54AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > It's always used those ASCII characters, 0x60 and 0x27, but the various > serial terminals I used to use years ago had bitmap fonts that had them > balanced, i.e. the ' lent to the right at the top.
So, where does that leave us? ` and ' are rendered as opening and closing quote marks on UTF-8. That would clearly imply that they should be used as such. \` can be used where a backtick (0x60) is required. \(aq can be used where an apostrophe (0x27) is required, but it is groff-specific -- for the linux man pages, hopefully that isn't an issue, but there are other man pages out there. BTW, I assume that historically, there was a difference between using ` and \`, at least with troff? Michael's complaint is that `, when used as a quote mark, looks ugly when using non-UTF-8 with modern fonts, and I quite agree. However, I'm not sure what can be done to fix this. Some possible options: * Render ` as ' for non-UTF-8 locales. (Could this be made optional?) Any man pages using ` as a backtick and not as a quote mark would be broken by this, but on UTF-8, they would need fixing anyway. * Render ' as ' (neutral apostrophe/quote) for UTF-8 locales. Then, ' could be used for both opening/closing quotes. This seems a bit extreme, IMO. * Work around the problem in the man pages, by using \(aq for all quote marks. There just has to be a better option, though... * Anything I've missed? Cheers, -- Stuart Brady
