Hi, Dave Kemper wrote on Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 02:47:50PM -0500: > On 4/29/17, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> At 2017-04-29T15:40:06+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>>> So yes, documentation kind of recommends "Don\(aqt listen". >> I don't interpret it that way. > Nor I. I stand corrected. As was pointed out to me by three people, I misread both manual pages. FYI, i submitted a patch adding a brief sentence to groff_char(7) making it less likely that others misunderstand it the the same way, also improving a few other aspects in the vicinity, and Carsten Kunze promptly checked and committed the patch (thanks for that). Yours, Ingo P.S. > On 4/29/17, Anthony J. Bentley <anth...@anjbe.name> wrote: >> 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. > Yes, and that remains a bad decision, because it conflates two > distinct marks of punctuation that have vastly different semantic > meanings, disallows automated checking for balanced quotation marks, > and causes other problems eloquently described in: > > https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/ After reading that and a few of the documents referenced from the comments, the question what Unicode should do seems complicated to me, in particular when intending to accomodate different languages and different times, and i don't think i should try to comment on whether Unicode ought to be amended in this respect. At least it is clear that using U+2019 for the apostrophe in English words is not unusual and that the "'" groff input character is a normal way to achieve that, so the current version of groff_char(7) accurately describes the current state of affairs. Whether that ought to be changed is another matter.
