Quotation marks

[Per Starbäck]

In GNU Emacs 22.0.93.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.8.20)

I think the quotation marks used in Emacs documentation and in Info
looks disturbing with modern fonts where 0x27 APOSTROPHE is a vertical
glyph and doesn't match 0x60 GRAVE ACCENT.

I suggest sometimes using a display table where they are replaced by
U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and
U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.

I've tried

(defvar curly-disp-table
  (let ((table (make-display-table)))
    (aset table ?` (vector 342392))     ; U+2018 left single quotation mark
    (aset table ?' (vector 342393))     ; U+2019 right single quotation mark
    table)
  "Display table with curly quotes for `'.")

(add-hook 'Info-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (set-window-display-table (selected-window) curly-disp-table)))

which works fine for me, even though I guess more would be needed to
make sure this only is done under the appropriate circumstances.
Also this display table would be useful in various help buffers and
maybe also in TeX mode, since TeX uses the same convention with
matching `'.

(A good treatise on the history of all these characters is the one by
Markus Kuhn at <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Emgk25/ucs/quotes.html>.)