Re: [Groff] Getting properly rendered single quotes in groff

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> > Since any code extracts, C, shell, etc., often already need
> > manipulation, perhaps because they contain the escape
> > character, it's these that should use \` and \', e.g.
> > 
> >     $ grep \'foo\\.bar\' \`find -name \'xxx.*\'\`
> 
> Agreed -- except that \' won't work -- you need \(aq, because
> \' renders to an acute accent -- but this did originally work
> for older troff, when the apostrophe and acute accent were one
> and the same.

I don't believe acute accent and apostrophe were ever
considered to be the same in troff.  What you're seeing
in the old documents is simply a hack to obtain a glyph
visually distinct from the apostrophe/quote of the roman font.
Even at that time I think it would have been preferable to
use a "terminal" font for code fragments, which, however,
was not available because of technical limitations.