Hi Werner,
> > Yeah, I think that's what's needed. Debian does tr \[oq] ' (only)
> > and I'm not sure if that's also be needed. For latin1, it might be
> > nicer to keep ` as it is, and instead map ' and \[cq] to an acute
> > accent.
>
> Well, since it is often the case that man pages cite shell input code
> like
>
> $ grep foo `find -name 'xxx.*'`
>
> it is quite important IMHO to have proper cut and paste from a man
> page displayed in a terminal.
Agreed.
> With other words: Within normal text, it's probably best to use \[oq]
> and \[cq], and within verbatim code fragments, plain ' and ` should be
> used as-is.
It's horrible for an author to have to use character escapes instead of
the glyphs readily available on the keyboard for normal text; it
interrupts the flow of typing. Surely the solution should allow the
`normal' entry of quotes in this case. Since any code extracts, C,
shell, etc., often already need manipulation, perhaps because they
contain the escape character, it's these that should use \` and \', e.g.
$ grep \'foo\\.bar\' \`find -name \'xxx.*\'\`
This is all existing standard practice as I understand it, and has been
since the year dot. So to flip it around seems wrong.
That just leaves getting grotty to output ' for ` if \*(.T is ascii by
doing .tr `' as you suggested. As Stuart says, this doesn't seem -man
specific. Is tty.tmac the place for this? With the change in glyph
appearance, perhaps troff needs to change too?
Cheers,
Ralph.
