On 5/13/20 1:39 PM, Dave Martin wrote: > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:11:21PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >> Hello Dave, >> >> On 5/12/20 6:36 PM, Dave Martin wrote: >>> Convert quote marks used for information terms in prose to use >>> \(oq .. \(cq, for better graphical rendering. >>> >>> Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@xxxxxxx> >> >> Again, this is a patch that I would prefer to see near the end >> of a series, rather than in the middle. >> >> I'm currently agnostic about this change. But, I do not >> want to apply this patch, since no other pages in man-pages >> use \(oq...\(cq. >> >> I haven't applied this patch. Luckily, that does not prevent >> any of the later patches applying. > > I'll be careful to move this sort of thing to the end of a series in > future. > > This was a provocative patch, so I'm happy for it to be dropped. > > > The main motivation was that ' renders to PostScript etc. as a closing > quote, which is fine for apostrophes but not fine for an opening quote > mark. Most of the current quotes in here are actually ", but I don't > see an actual promise from groff that that renders as a neutral glyph > either, so it seemed best to avoid. For now " does seem to be rendered > with a neutral glyph (i.e., neither opening or closing). See my commit 11b0b31a14bd2c7dcb0cf7bc815b4c1887444a89, just pushed, which addresses the ' issues. >>> --- >>> >>> Note, this can lead to misrendering on badly-configured systems. >>> However, many man pages do it. >> >> Can you say some more about this please? > > Terminal character maps need to match LANG etc. in order for fancy > characters coming out of nroff to display correctly. > > ssh attempts to send LANG across, but terminal sessions between systems > that have different locales installed can be a problem, as can dumb > serial links that don't magically pass the locale and terminal type > settings across. > > The fact that I hit this problem a lot in some situations (particularly > the serial link case) suggested to me that fancy characters are > considered fine nowadays, but perhaps I'd need to dig into it some more > to understand the situation fully. Thanks for the clarification. > (There are one or two ' that should really be \(aq anyway, but I'll > try to address that separately.) See above. I presume that patch is what you wanted? Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/