*> It's if they choose, or are coerced, into a LC_CTYPE=C locale causing -Tascii that they see asymmetric `'.*
Uhm. Is this issue more of a "would like to have" instead of something objectively problematic....? For a start, I see ``this'' in project readmes and plain-text docs all the time, and Emacs Lisp even uses quote-pairs in docstrings to denote symbol references. Which means that plugging this issue is really a drop in the ocean — there's countless more documentation out there, in plain text, which readers have to put up with seeing on a regular basis. If all we're catering to is ASCII-shackled users who hate the ``weird'' looking quotes, well… these folks are free to define an alias, set MANPAGER to a wrapper script that pipes formatted output through tr '`' "'", or hack on their troffrc files with something clever like `.if #\*(.T#ascii# .char \(oq "'` or something... As somebody in this thread stated before me, we're spending a little too much thought on what's essentially bikeshedding. As an aside, I wrote a package for Atom <https://github.com/Alhadis/Atom-XTermQuotes> that uses plain old CSS and HTML to mask `this' to look like real directional quotes (and only making a habit of targeting prose, not source code). Amazing how well it works. ;-) Maybe every terminal should be supporting CSS instead? — John On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 23:14, Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: > Hi Jeff, > > > > Thus one that makes 60 and 27 look like a left/right pair of single > > > quotes, and also grave and acute accents for over-striking. > > > > This is yet a third possibility, which the editor of the 1967 standard > > said was also true of the earlier version. They gave possibilities, > > but intended no recommendations on which options to choose. > > Agreed. But industry, to my recollection and Googling, seems to have > settled on symmetric quotes that could double as accents to get the most > use out of those two bytes. The lineprinter we had, don't know the make > other than it wasn't IBM nor DEC, also made them symmetric. > > > Perhaps an even more relevant consideration: what percentage of > > displays today are in conflict with the ISO 646 encoding? Shouldn’t > > the objective be the greatest good for the greatest number? > > It's not the displays that matter. Those seeing asymmetric `' that > would like that changed have displays that can, and normally do, render > with -Tutf8 and so see symmetric ‘’ instead. It's if they choose, or > are coerced, into a LC_CTYPE=C locale causing -Tascii that they see > asymmetric `'. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > >
