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

[onf]

On Sat Dec 21, 2024 at 1:29 AM CET, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> > 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.

You can just use .char in or .fchar in the unlikely case that
\[Bq] and \[lq] aren't good enough. I don't think we need to
complicate it more than that, at least as far as groff documents
are concerned. For instance, one document I'm currently working
on has this at the top:
  .\" setup auto czech double quotes
  .nr Q 0
  .ds Q0 \[Bq]
  .ds Q1 \[lq]
  .char " \\*[Q\\nQ]\\R'Q (\\nQ == 0)'
  .
  .\" setup czech single quotes
  .char ` \[bq]
  .char ' \[oq]
  .char \' \[cq]

(the auto quotes don't have separate state per environment,
but it doesn't matter in my particular use case; one could
use register Q\n[.ev] instead at the cost of triggering
`reg` warnings)

> > 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.

I get that, but by using \[lq] and \[rq] you end up with a
top-heavy right quote anyway, so how does that make a
difference?

~ onf