On Fri Dec 20, 2024 at 2:38 PM CET, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote: > > so that English users get \[lq] and \[rq] while German users > > get \[Bq] and \[lq] etc. > > That is terrible advice. While the "English left quote" in > Times is identical to the "German right quote" in Times, this > is not true for Courier. It would be much better to define > "German left quote" and "German right quote" characters and > map these to the appropriate glyphs individually in each font.
I don't know what the "German right quote" character is in Courier; please provide me with a character code in groff's "Courier" font if you know it. As a matter of fact my native tongue uses German quotes and while Courier's left English quote looks slightly off in such usage (mostly due to \[Bq] having being angled differently), I'm not sure whether that's not just a case of Courier being a poor typeface. I am not aware of \[lq] not being equivalent to German right quote in any other typeface, although most add slightly more space before \[lq] than after the \[Bq], but it's not noticable unless you focus on it. In any case, as far as I know, \[Bq] and \[lq] is the way to obtain German-style quotes in groff. If you know of a better way, tell me, please. > > I assume the reason for using the strings `lq` and `rq` > > instead of characters of the same name is that the strings > > can be defined differently based on the current locale, > > The style of the quote should depend on the language of the > manual page, not on the locale. E.g., if I am in a German > locale but reading an manual page written in English, the > quote characters should be those used in English, not German. > Therefore, the quote characters can be fixed in the manual > page source itself (which is different for each language) > and thus do not require customization. I should have worded it better. What I meant was locale of the document as set e.g. by `.mso den.tmac`. I completely agree that this should be in line with the language in which the document is written. ~ onf
