> * People may discover that quotation marks are properly available in > the man(7) language, a fact that has been obscure for 45 years. (The > `\*(lq` and `\*(rq` syntax has been available since day one [1979]. I > suspect these failed because man page authors who weren't already > practiced in *roff had no idea what a *roff string was, or how to > interpolate one, and the elaborate syntax filled them with fear.)
As the guy who added .RB, .TP. etc. to v7 -man, I don't think of myself as one "who [wasn't] already practiced in *roff". As the editor of v7 volume 1, I wrote the man(7) page, which didn't exist in earlier editions. (The man macros had been so simple that s.tmac [sic] served as its own documentation.) The new man page documented just two strings, neither of which exists in groff tmac.s. If \*(lq and \*(rq were in fact defined, ignorance of them should be blamed on the editor's oversight, not on other authors' unfamiliarity with *roff. As for the issue at hand, habits and intents for the placement of quotes relative to adjacent punctuation are so idiosyncratic that a pair of macros can serve only in the simplest case. As if the choice among keyboard quote mark, \[lq] and \*[lq] were not vexing enough, the proposal adds another alternative. It may rope in \c as well. So I question its justifiability. The longer the -man man page gets, the less it will be heeded. That said, I do prefer macro calls to backslash escapes embedded in text. I just think that the present proposal is insufficient to the task. And \c is the nail in the coffin. Doug
