Hi Branden, On 1/6/23 01:17, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Hi Alex, At 2023-01-06T00:53:11+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:On 1/5/23 23:53, G. Branden Robinson wrote:* Set page topic in lowercase. * Use typographer's quotation marks instead of '"' for quotation.Isn't it equivalent in running text? '"' is simpler to type.No, it's not equivalent anywhere except on the "ascii", "latin1", and "cp1047" output devices. $ groff -man -Tpdf <<EOF > quote.pdf .TH foo 1 2023-01-05 "groff test suite" .SH Name foo \- "frobnicate" a \(lqbar\(rq EOF $ evince quote.pdf
For some reason, I momentarily though that those would produce the same code.I think I was confused by some other thing: in some cases you can use '"', but in others you must use \(dq (macro arguments). Probably that triggered a wrong connection in my brain...
Which by the way reminds me that in language, we use the ellipses together with the last word. Where did this idea of separating it in synopses come from? Maybe logic thinking, such as placing the period outside of quotes...
So, I guess I'll pick that patch. I'll tell you if I do. Cheers, Alex
It _is_ simpler to type just ", and many other man page authors seem to have found it so. That is why I have proposed a `Q` quotation macro, because without it, man page authors seem to forego quotation entirely in favor of italics, bold, or nothing. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-12/msg00078.html Historically, TeX-style quotation ``like this'' has been seen in *roff documents, but the practice is almost nonexistent in the Linux man-pages corpus. ``This'' is so ugly on ISO 8859 and later character set-based terminals that I don't wonder why people avoid it. https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n411.pdf ...is a copy of part 1 of ECMA-94, the gratis equivalent of ISO 8859, and shows what the ' and ` glyphs are supposed to look like. Regards, Branden
-- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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