Hi Ingo,
Ingo Schwarze writes:
> Accents
> In output modes supporting such special output characters, for
> example -T pdf, some roff(7) formatters convert the following
> ASCII input characters to the following Unicode special output
> characters:
>
> ` U+2018 left single quotation mark
> ' U+2019 right single quotation mark
> ~ U+02DC small tilde
>
> In prose, this automatic substitution is often desirable; but
> when these characters have to be displayed as plain ASCII
> characters, for example in source code samples, they require
> escaping to render as follows:
>
> \(ga U+0060 grave accent
> \(aq U+0027 apostrophe
> \(ti U+007E tilde
>
> So yes, documentation kind of recommends "Don\(aqt listen".
Prose does not fall under this category. "Source code samples" is a
pretty limited category in my book.
> Arguably, apostrophes are at least as common in english prose
> as single quotes, so the decision to make single quotes easier
> to type at the expense of making apostophes harder to type
> could have been questioned.
Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both
right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section
of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6. This matches up with the usage I've seen
ever since becoming interested in typography.
When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as
apostrophe, but only U+0027 is present on most keyboards. Software
commonly offers a facility for automatically converting the U+0027
APOSTROPHE to a contextually selected curly quotation glyph. ...
U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred where the character
is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: "We've been
here before." In this latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a
punctation apostrophe.
TeX, for example, does the same thing. There, the conversion to U+2019
is done for text, but in math ' is converted to U+2032 PRIME. (Well,
TeX predates Unicode, but you know what I mean.)
Thus, I typically escape ' in source code listings and other situations
where I need the literal ASCII character '. But when I need an actual
apostrophe, I use ' as-is to take advantage of troff's automatic
conversion. Similarly, I only use " when specifically an ASCII double
quote is needed, such as when referring to C strings, and use
typographic quotes at all other times.
--
Anthony J. Bentley
