Hi onf, At 2024-12-20T02:21:00+0100, onf wrote: > I assume the reason for using the strings `lq` and `rq` instead of > characters of the same name is that the strings can be defined > differently based on the current locale,
If so, that was pretty forward-looking for Berkeley in 1980. > so that English users get \[lq] and \[rq] while German users get \[Bq] > and \[lq] etc. It's possible. I think another possibility is that someone was annoyed by the way double quotation marks were spaced--just look carefully at the double quotes in either edition of Kernighan & Ritchie some time-- and defining a string enabled them to hide some kerning adjustments where man page authors wouldn't have to worry about them. At Berkeley I think they didn't use the C/A/T, or not much. Instead they often used Versatec and Benson-Varian plotters and ran a program called "vtroff" to convert the C/A/T output produced by Seventh Edition Unix troff into something the plotters would understand. IIRC, that's per Clem Cole on the TUHS list. I wasn't around for that. As far as I know Berkeley never adopted device-independent troff. That was a commercial product (unless Brian Kernighan leaked you a copy of his research version, with which DWB tried to remain mostly compatible). This is why they were early adopters of groff.[1] Before the BSD community decided upon the performative wokeness of rabid allergies to copyleft and (at OpenBSD at least) C++. All told, even by 4.3BSD-Tahoe (the last BSD before the CSRG migrated to mdoc in rage at AT&T/USL), fully eight years after 4BSD introduced these strings, there hadn't been much uptake. By my count, of the 793 man pages in that release, 62 adopted `\*(lq` and `\*(rq`. To be fair, it could be that occasions for quotation naturally came up in less than 1% of man(1) documents. It's hard to say. ...but 294 pages match ``, and 291 match ''. So...the gambit may simply have been unsuccessful. The fiery spirit of innovation around Project Ingres left plenty of space for old dogs. Regards, Branden [1] https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/usr.bin/groff/VERSION
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