Hi again Stuart, I wrote: > So it seems clear that man pages should use \` or its verbose \(ga > equivalent when they mean a shell backtick operator, ASCII character > 96.
Interestingly, this is the opposite to the ", \(lq, and \(rq characters. With these, the one for pasting into the shell is the simple " and if you want the typographically orientated ones, you use \(lq and \(rq. I guess it's like this because keyboards offer `, ', and " characters so troff makes it easy to enter sexy single quotes and sexless double quotes. On a related note, although I've seen doubling up of ` and ' to give `` and '', like TeX IIRC, they don't produce the same output as using \(lq and \(rq so I guess they're not the right way to do that. Cheers, Ralph.
