On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Werner LEMBERG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Personally, I would prefer that quotes render sensibly in utf8, html >> and dvi, and that correctly written man pages do not need any >> modification. Also, the use of `foo' is very convenient (even if it >> no longer appears balanced in the source). > > Let me try to summarize: > > . What people like to input in man pages is this: > > `foo' should be equal to \[oq]foo\[cq] > > \`foo\' should be equal to <ASCII 0x60>foo<ASCII 0x27> > > I say `in man pages' because \` and \' act as accents too, but > this is, AFAIK, not used (a quick search in the man pages on my > SuSE GNU/Linux box showed not a single man file which uses \' or > \` as an accent). > > . Depending on the output device, ` and ' should be mapped to > different characters. However, \` and \' should always map to > ASCII 0x60 and ASCII 0x27 for proper cut and paste support. > > Do you all agree with this?
This all sounds reasonable. If needed I will adapt the 800 or so (Section 2, 3, 4, 5, 7) pages in man-pages to whatever input form is needed (provded it is not a heavy form -- e.g., not troff conditionals), so long as I can get what I consider to be decent *output*. That is, balanced single quotes in ASCII (that probably means the equivalent of \(aq...\(aq ), and balanced quotes in UTF-8 (as can currently be obtained by `...'). Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html
