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From: "Anthony J. Bentley" <anthony@cathet.us>
To: tech@mdocml.bsd.lv
Subject: Re: manpages patch: escape apostrophe, grave, tilde
In-reply-to: <20150321200110.GA32119@athene.usta.de>
References: <20198.1426930253@CATHET.us> <20150321200110.GA32119@athene.usta.de>
Comments: In-reply-to Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>
   message dated "Sat, 21 Mar 2015 21:01:10 +0100."
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Content-ID: <29786.1427091706.1@CATHET.us>
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 00:21:46 -0600
Message-ID: <17693.1427091706@CATHET.us>

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Schwarze writes:
> Hi Anthony,
> 
> Anthony J. Bentley wrote on Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 03:30:53AM -0600:
> 
> > Both groff and Heirloom troff transform the following characters in
> > typeset output such as -Tpdf:
> > 
> >   transforms ` into U+2018 (left single quote)
> >   transforms ' into U+2019 (right single quote)
> >   transforms ~ into U+02DC (small tilde)
> > 
> > (Plan 9 and mandoc only do the first two.)
> > 
> > These, particularly the second one, are desirable when used in prose.
> > But when the original ASCII character is meant (such as when listing
> > command-line input, or describing how to escape characters), it must
> > be escaped to provide correct output in all formats.
> 
> I hate this.  It is backwards, i consider it a bug in troff.

I wouldn't call it a bug. Converting ' to an apostrophe is a very
natural thing for a typesetter to do, and troff has done so since the
mid 1970s if not earlier. The vast majority of uses of ', even in
manuals, are in prose, not code examples that need a literal ASCII '.
Escaping the few instances where it is necessary is not a huge burden.

I do care about PDF output. In fact for at least five years I've often
referred to groff's PDF output when looking at manuals because it
provides a greater visual distinction between different types of
semantic input than the terminal, or even mandoc HTML output.

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley
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