> The "crude hack" [...] effectively turns apostrophe into prime, > known in groff as foot mark, \[fm], which may be what you were > hoping for.
I disagree. The prime (or foot mark, or minute mark) is actually slightly slanted, whereas the typewriter quote is (usually) exactly vertical. The typewriter quote should not be used in place of a prime. It is only acceptable where you want to emulate a typewriter (or maybe to typeset computer code)[*], and nowhere else. Eqn translates "ASCII single quote" to a real prime. [*] But I really prefer computer code typeset with "balanced" right and left single quotes. The character at ASCII position 60h was often called "backquote" for the simple reason that it really was a symmetrical version of the "quote". This was very common on UNIX systems before Unicode became the rage, as many fonts were encoded with Adobe's ISOLatin1Encoding, which had a real right quote at position 27h, and a real left quote at position 60h.
