Re: [Groff] German quotation marks in ms

[Joerg van den Hoff]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 02:31:34PM +0200, Axel Kielhorn wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm writing a german document in ms and I'm wondering about the best 
> way to enter quotation marks.
> 
> Should I
> .ds Q \(Bq
> .ds U \(lq
> and use
> \*Q \*U?
> 
> or can I simply use ,,and''?
> 
> The later is much easier to type (and read) and the result looks the 
> same.
> 
> Axel
> 
> 
> 

I believe the upper single quotes are translated to  "superscript commas"
but \(lq is kind of an "inverted superscript comma". `,,' looks _very_ similar
to \(Bq at least in times roman but it matches not exactly:

.DS
,,
.sp -1v
\(Bq
.DE

lines up 99% but not 100% in `gv' ...

anyway:
I use double `""' in the text such as in

ABC die ""Katze"" lief im Schnee

and pipe the troff source through a small `sed' script:

sed -e '
   #skip comments
   /^\.\\"/b
   #german quotation marks
   s/""\(.*\)""/\\(Bq\1\\(lq/g
'

prior to formatting which replacess _pairs_ of double quotes with intervening
characters by the correct quotation marks. this therefore works only if the
closing quotes are on the same _input_ line but this can be always be
enforced (sometimes the editor's autowrap comes in the way a bit ...).

in this way I've never experienced any unintended substitutions (i.e. things
which are matched by the `sed' pattern, but should'nt).

This works fine for me.

joerg