Re: Proposed: QS/QE macros for quotation in man(7)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi onf,

At 2024-12-20T02:21:00+0100, onf wrote:
> I assume the reason for using the strings `lq` and `rq` instead of
> characters of the same name is that the strings can be defined
> differently based on the current locale,

If so, that was pretty forward-looking for Berkeley in 1980.

> so that English users get \[lq] and \[rq] while German users get \[Bq]
> and \[lq] etc.

It's possible.  I think another possibility is that someone was annoyed
by the way double quotation marks were spaced--just look carefully at
the double quotes in either edition of Kernighan & Ritchie some time--
and defining a string enabled them to hide some kerning adjustments
where man page authors wouldn't have to worry about them.  At Berkeley I
think they didn't use the C/A/T, or not much.  Instead they often used
Versatec and Benson-Varian plotters and ran a program called "vtroff" to
convert the C/A/T output produced by Seventh Edition Unix troff into
something the plotters would understand.

IIRC, that's per Clem Cole on the TUHS list.  I wasn't around for that.

As far as I know Berkeley never adopted device-independent troff.  That
was a commercial product (unless Brian Kernighan leaked you a copy of
his research version, with which DWB tried to remain mostly compatible).
This is why they were early adopters of groff.[1]  Before the BSD
community decided upon the performative wokeness of rabid allergies to
copyleft and (at OpenBSD at least) C++.

All told, even by 4.3BSD-Tahoe (the last BSD before the CSRG migrated to
mdoc in rage at AT&T/USL), fully eight years after 4BSD introduced these
strings, there hadn't been much uptake.  By my count, of the 793 man
pages in that release, 62 adopted `\*(lq` and `\*(rq`.

To be fair, it could be that occasions for quotation naturally came up
in less than 1% of man(1) documents.  It's hard to say.

...but 294 pages match ``, and 291 match ''.

So...the gambit may simply have been unsuccessful.  The fiery spirit of
innovation around Project Ingres left plenty of space for old dogs.

Regards,
Branden

[1] 
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Net2/usr/src/usr.bin/groff/VERSION

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature