[self-follow-up] At 2022-12-13T12:23:56-0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2022-12-13T17:54:22+0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > > If the idea is to entirely do away with producing quotes manually
Ya gotta be careful around Ralph--he slips in these antecedents that render the question ill-posed... The idea is not "to entirely do away with producting quotes manually". They might still be necessary for lengthy quotes (say, longer than one input line) or complex situations involving nesting of quotations with typeface changes, or in cases where a man page author simply wants to retain control of quotation glyph selection (as Commonwealth folks might prefer). It is possible to do this today, and has been for years. The problem is not that quotation is impossible in man(7); it's that it is, apparently, too difficult. People reach for `.B` and `.I` instead. `.Q` would make it just as easy as those. .Q "Just quote it," he said. If one were to observe that \fB and \fI are also easy, then I would agree that \(lq and \(rq (or \(oq and \(cq) should not constitute significantly higher barriers than font selection escape sequences, and yet, apparently, they do. That's why I think groff should add a `Q` macro for quotation to man(7). Regards, Branden
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