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

[onf]

On Fri Dec 20, 2024 at 2:38 PM CET, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> > so that English users get \[lq] and \[rq] while German users
> > get \[Bq] and \[lq] etc.
>
> That is terrible advice.  While the "English left quote" in
> Times is identical to the "German right quote" in Times, this
> is not true for Courier.  It would be much better to define
> "German left quote" and "German right quote" characters and
> map these to the appropriate glyphs individually in each font.

I don't know what the "German right quote" character is in Courier;
please provide me with a character code in groff's "Courier" font
if you know it. As a matter of fact my native tongue uses German
quotes and while Courier's left English quote looks slightly off
in such usage (mostly due to \[Bq] having being angled differently),
I'm not sure whether that's not just a case of Courier being a poor
typeface. I am not aware of \[lq] not being equivalent to German right
quote in any other typeface, although most add slightly more space
before \[lq] than after the \[Bq], but it's not noticable unless you
focus on it.

In any case, as far as I know, \[Bq] and \[lq] is the way to obtain
German-style quotes in groff. If you know of a better way, tell me,
please.

> > 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,
>
> The style of the quote should depend on the language of the
> manual page, not on the locale.  E.g., if I am in a German
> locale but reading an manual page written in English, the
> quote characters should be those used in English, not German.
> Therefore, the quote characters can be fixed in the manual
> page source itself (which is different for each language)
> and thus do not require customization.

I should have worded it better. What I meant was locale of the
document as set e.g. by `.mso den.tmac`. I completely agree
that this should be in line with the language in which the
document is written.

~ onf