Re: [TIP] Get rid of the `foo' eyesore

[Florian Weimer]

Edward Dodge <someone@g3.com> writes:

> That horrible abuse of single-quotation marks seems to be a hold-over
> of TeX.  Essentially,  it's TeX's way of printing "smartquotes,"
> where ` is the 6-shaped quote-mark and ' prints as the 9-shaped one.

This is just a consequence of the traditional ASCII representation of
TeX input.  Twenty years ago, "`" probably showed up as a left
quotation mark on people's terminals (Computer Modern Typewriter
reflects this).