Hi Doug,
> By contrast, 80 pages contained ` (0x60) used as a left quote, usually
> paired with ' (0x27) but (surprisingly) sometimes with \(aq.
Here, cvs(1) is one page that does that a lot.
$ zgrep -om3 '`.*aq' cvs.1.gz
`Invoking CVS\(aq
`Global options\(aq
`Password authentication server\(aq
$
Its source starts
.\" This is the man page for CVS. It is auto-generated from the
.\" cvs.man.header, cvs.texinfo, & cvs.man.footer files. Please make
changes
.\" there. A full copyright & license notice may also be found in
cvs.texinfo.
It looks like a Perl script does the s/'/\\(aq/g.
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/cvs/ccvs/doc/mkman.pl?revision=1.6&view=markup
> Although it might help to render \(oq as ' on man pages, it would be
> wrong to render 0x60 that way, lest examples in which the distinction
> matters be mutilated.
When looking at groff_char(7) the other day before replying, I saw
things like
' the ISO latin1 ‘Apostrophe’ (code 39) prints as ', a right
single quotation mark; the original character can be obtained
with ‘\(aq’.
' \[aa] acute u0301 (u00B4) acute accent
` \[ga] grave u0300 (u0060) grave accent
--
Cheers, Ralph.
