Neil Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I used to come across this intermittently - usually when trying to copy > and paste examples from a manpage. However, the situation appears solved > in a Unicode environment: > > This perldoc code: > Only print the list, do not call 'sudo dpkg -P' > becomes this manpage content: > \&Only print the list, do not call \(aqsudo dpkg \-P\(aq > which displays as: > Only print the list, do not call 'sudo dpkg -P' > > Changing the original code to: > Only print the list, do not call `sudo dpkg -P` > becomes this manpage content: > \&Only print the list, do not call `sudo dpkg \-P` > which displays as: > Only print the list, do not call ‘sudo dpkg -P‘ > > So it may be more useful to investigate the manpage generator packages > rather than a bug against the 'general' metapackage. If I'm following > this right, you would seek that pod2man retains the existing behaviour > for ' (first example) and changes the handling of ` from ` to \ga > (second example)?
This is fixed in the version of Pod::Man that will be included in Perl 5.10. I think Brendan is currently working on getting that into experimental. For the record, \(aq is groff-specific, so upstreams who care about platforms other than Linux won't like this change. I'm not sure about \(ga, but \` worked fine in my testing. (\' doesn't; it generates an acute accent mark instead.) The new version of pod2man adds: .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq .el .ds Aq ' to the preamble and then uses \*(Aq for apostrophes, which falls back on a regular ' for non-groff. But non-groff generally don't do Unicode, and this is therefore usually okay except in the rarer case of troff output. It uses \` for grave accent marks. If anyone knows of a more general solution, I'm all ears. Note that it only does this in verbatim text and in C<> blocks, so people who use 'text' or `text' in general text in POD will still get the Unicode quotes. I think this is the correct behavior, but I'm always open to further suggestions. (I'm upstream for Pod::Man.) Given the number of pod2man-generated man pages, it's probably not worth trying to track this down too much until we get an updated Pod::Man into the archive. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
