> > Should nroff render `` '' as typographical double quotes > > instead of literal ASCII values? > > No, definitely not, IMO. It should render them exactly as > what the input says is intended, i.e. two grave accents and > two apostrophes. If a typographic representation is what is > wanted ... well, that is precisely why we have more expressive > input notations, such as \(oq, \(cq, \(lq, and \(rq, (for > which macro packages may often define equivalent string > representations).
I agree. Also, it can't do this easily if it reads them as separate input characters, unless we generalize the ligature mechanism (like in TeX) to recognize sequences other than the five "f"-combinations hardcoded into groff. NB, in the good old days of X11 we used Adobe's ISOLatin1Encoding in which those "grave accents" (0x60) *were* typographical left quotes (and the apostrophes (0x27) typographical right quotes / apostrophes) in both nroff and troff. It's only since Unicode screwed up the encoding that we have these aesthetic problems.
