At 2025-12-07T09:10:27+0100, Alexis (surryhill) wrote: > my fallback groff is the stable version 1.23.0 with the > only following added man.local and mdoc.local in site-tmac: > https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/by-name/gr/groff/site.tmac
[Abraham Simpson shakes fist at cloud]
groff_man_style(7):
Notes
Some tips on composing and troubleshooting your man pages follow.
...
• When and how should I use quotation marks?
...
Obtaining directional single quotation marks is more of a
challenge. Historically, man pages used ` and ' exclusively
for them. However, in recent years, some distributors of groff
have chosen to override the meanings of these characters in man
pages, remapping them to their Unicode Basic Latin code points.
Unfortunately, ` and ' are the only reliable means of obtaining
directional single quotation marks in AT&T troff; in that
implementation, often no special character escape sequences
exist to obtain them. Further, AT&T troff’s special character
identifiers, like its font names, were device‐specific. To
achieve quotation portably in man pages rendered both by AT&T
and more modern troffs, consider adding a preamble to your page
after the TH call as follows.
.ie \n(.g \{\
. ds oq \[oq]\"
. ds cq \[cq]\"
.\}
.el \{\
. ds oq `\"
. ds cq '\"
.\}
You must then use the \* escape sequence to interpolate the
quotation mark strings.
The command
.RB \*(oq "while !\& git pull; do sleep 10; done" \*(cq
retries an update from the repository until it succeeds.
If this procedure seems complex, petition your distributor to
revert their remapping of the ` and ' characters.
Regards,
Branden
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