On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 02:31:34PM +0200, Axel Kielhorn wrote: > Hi! > > I'm writing a german document in ms and I'm wondering about the best > way to enter quotation marks. > > Should I > .ds Q \(Bq > .ds U \(lq > and use > \*Q \*U? > > or can I simply use ,,and''? > > The later is much easier to type (and read) and the result looks the > same. > > Axel > > >
I believe the upper single quotes are translated to "superscript commas" but \(lq is kind of an "inverted superscript comma". `,,' looks _very_ similar to \(Bq at least in times roman but it matches not exactly: .DS ,, .sp -1v \(Bq .DE lines up 99% but not 100% in `gv' ... anyway: I use double `""' in the text such as in ABC die ""Katze"" lief im Schnee and pipe the troff source through a small `sed' script: sed -e ' #skip comments /^\.\\"/b #german quotation marks s/""\(.*\)""/\\(Bq\1\\(lq/g ' prior to formatting which replacess _pairs_ of double quotes with intervening characters by the correct quotation marks. this therefore works only if the closing quotes are on the same _input_ line but this can be always be enforced (sometimes the editor's autowrap comes in the way a bit ...). in this way I've never experienced any unintended substitutions (i.e. things which are matched by the `sed' pattern, but should'nt). This works fine for me. joerg
