Re: [BUG] groff: inconsistent behavior of " to separate arguments

[G. Branden Robinson]

Ho humm,

At 2022-03-25T09:17:59+0000, Humm wrote:
> Quoth G. Branden Robinson:
> > As far as I know, groff innovated these character definitions, and my
> > hat's off to James Clark for doing so.  Lacking them for so long strikes
> > me as...blinkered.
> 
> When was that?  In the git commit messages I see it in 2000.

It appears the history of the two neutral quote-like glyphs is split in
groff's history.

\(aq shows up in groff-1.06 (1992-09-01), and is apparently James
Clark's work.  On the ps device, it maps to the "quotesingle" glyph.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=b04d345ed2d875a6ae26b95e97e0d8e91c4e3886

Regarding \(dq, you are correct.  It shows up in the following commits.

commit 99c93699043100a1b83e4dce7a0c498a1ca42952
Author: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>
Date:   Thu May 4 07:44:39 2000 +0000

    Adding `dq' (PS name `quotedbl') glyph name as an alias for `"'.

    * fonts/*/*: Implement it.
    * man/groff_char.man, NEWS: Document it.

commit 21175b7f38a1ef12626db0793db85b8d4b089625
Author: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>
Date:   Thu May 4 07:39:12 2000 +0000

    * DviChar.c: Adding `dq' as an alias for `"' in latin-1 map.

So my thanks go to both James and Werner for doing what no 1980s troff
would.

> \(dq appears in the first edition of Plan 9 in the devutf device.  The
> files are dated 1993-01-04.

Thank you for clarifying.  I don't have any Plan 9 source artifacts from
that far back; I use "n-t-roff"'s GitHub repository, for which the first
commit is dated 12 October 2014.

A cursory Google search did not turn up downloadable source archives of
any release prior to the fourth edition, though it appears there should
be no legal impediment to their distribution[1].

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=161650489113326

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature