Hi Ingo,
> It is not outright impossible, but i doubt that would be a wise
> course.
I agree, given your reasoning.
> And the correct way to mark up a single-quoted string in low-level
> roff(7) is \(oq...\(cq, with the rendering decided by the output
> device.
I think you're incorrect there. Using «`'» as input has always been a
correct way to get single left and right quotes; see CSTR 54 2.1.
> in man(7), i'm not aware of any reasonable alternative to writing
> \(oq...\(cq directly in the manual page source code when authors want
> single quoting.
Due to some, all?, man renderers trying to keep a shell backquote as a
paste-able backquote, for example.
.\" For UTF-8, map some characters conservatively for the sake
.\" of easy cut and paste.
.
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
. rchar \- - ' `
.
. char \- \N'45'
. char - \N'45'
. char ' \N'39'
. char ` \N'96'
.\}
> It doubt that the benefit of avoiding the ugly ` ' in ASCII output is
> worth these (at least) three downsides.
Whom is this change is meant to benefit? I've lost track.
Surely all you hepcats with your UTF-8 TTYs and Unicode fonts see «‘’».
Could it be those that will see ASCII output in practice align with
those that are happy to stick with seeing «`'»?
--
Cheers, Ralph.
