Ralph Corderoy writes: > Hi, > > Carsten mentioned man pages appearing with ``ugly'' doubled single > quotes, as if it were ugly TeX input. ;-) I think some of that might > be down to the man page authors rather than groff's rendering of > correctly written man pages. > > $ zgrep '``' /usr/share/man/man1/find.1.gz > exist, it is truncated. The file names ``/dev/stdout'' and > ``/dev/stderr'' are handled specially; they refer to the standard > $
Well, `` and '' get rendered as typographic double quotes in troff, but at least in my setup nroff outputs them literally. Because of that I don't know of a way to specify typographic quotes in man(7) input aside from ugly escape sequences like \(lq and \(rq. In general I only write mdoc(7) pages, and there I use Dq when I need double quotes. Should nroff render `` '' as typographical double quotes instead of literal ASCII values? Maybe, but there's a lot more down that rabbit hole. Haven't there been discussions about \- (apparently an en dash/minus in troff, ASCII hyphen-minus in nroff) and - (apparently hyphen in troff, ASCII hyphen-minus in nroff) before? -- Anthony J. Bentley
