Re: [Groff] [patch] Typographic quotes in -mdoc %T

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> By ASCII I meant specifically ASCII output. I use UTF-8 terminals
>> and the patch was intended to improve how the nroff output looks in
>> that case.
> 
> That you use UTF-8 terminals is completely irrelevant; you are
> confusing two distinct concepts here -- a character encoding
> (UTF-8), and the *font* used for display.  No matter that the
> encoding is UTF-8, depending on configured choice of font, your
> "typographic" quotes may look nicely balanced, or horrendously
> ghastly; what looks nice to you may look hideous to others, with a
> different font configuration.

groff uses different quotes depending on -Tascii or -Tutf8:

  devascii:   lq   "
  devlatin1:  lq   "
  devutf8:    lq   u201C   (via `glyphuni.cpp')

Using \*[Lq] and \*[Rq] in Anthony's patch is definitely correct.  In
file `doc-nroff', however, they are mapped to \[lq] and \[rq] for
-Tutf8 only.  The other TTY devices get `` and ''.  Given that the GNU
standard already moved away from `foo' and ``foo'' to 'foo' and "foo"
for TTY devices that are not capable of representing correct quote
characters, we probably should revise the code in `doc-nroff'.  At
least it is worth a bug tracker issue :-)


    Werner