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

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> From that message I get the impression that your claim of
> \[Bq] and \[lq] being "terrible advice" was quite overstated;
> it seems to come down to a small number of bad typefaces.

Are they, though?  Even in English, there exist different styles
of quote characters, as exemplified by IBM's vs. Adobe's Courier.

The point I was trying to make is that it's a bad idea to make
the characters used in your document unnecessarily dependent
on the particular font that is being used, requiring you
to edit the document and replace the characters should you
decide to set it in a different font in the future.  It is
much better to define symbolic characters with the meaning of
"left/right quote character suitable for use with German text"
(e.g., like TeX has \glqq and \grqq for German left and right
double quotes) and then map those characters to the correct
glyphs in the font, or to suitable fallback characters if
the font doesn't have the correct glyphs.

> By the way, I don't understand how you arrived at the
> conclusion that \[lq] and \[rq] are preferrable to \[Bq]
> and \[lq] in Adobe Courier; from the image it seems to me
> that \[Bq] and \[rq] would achieve the same effect as the
> IBM Courier example.

Attached is a PDF showing the differences.  If you zoom
in, you can see that the \[lq] in IBM Courier, which is
bottom-heavy (like the \[lq] in Times), is not the same
as \[rq] in Adobe Courier, which is top-heavy.

germanquotes.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document