Re: FAMILY-dependent apostrophe behaviour with -mom

[Dale Snell]

On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 11:09 AM Marc Simpson <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've noticed a difference in the typesetting of apostrophes depending
> on selected font family with groff -mom.
>
> Steps to reproduce (GNU groff version 1.22.4, from MacPorts):

Hi Marc,

I had the same problem some months back.  I posted some messages
here about it, though I don't remember the dates.

Question:  How are you running Groff?  I was using pdfmom to build
my PDFs, and wound up with typewriter apostrophes in my PDF
output.  However, on a whim, I changed to pdfroff, and suddenly it
all worked correctly.  So was it something I did, or a bug in
pdfmom, or groff, or Peter's install-font.sh script, or, or...?
I don't know.  I have a file of personal macros that I include
when I build anything, and I added the line

.tr '\[cq]

which worked, though .char is probably clearer.  Also, the problem
is not system-dependent; you're apparently using MacOS, while I'm
running Fedora 29.

Anyway, the workaround for me was to use pdfroff.  The command
line is quite a bit longer, but since I have Emacs programmed to
run groff from a single function key, I really don't care.  :-)

> It's unclear to me why this behaviour differs on the basis of family;
> is this a bug, a difference caused by installing a custom font, or
> simply user error?  (If the behaviour is intentional, then there's a
> related state bug in CODE toggling.)

I don't think it's intentional.  I've added fonts before and not
had this problem.  I've not tried rolling back to a prior version
of Groff to check to see if it's version dependent.  I probably
should, One of These Days™.

I'm sorry I can't give you an outright cure, but at least you know
you're not alone.  :-)

Anyway, I hope this helps.

--Dale

-- 
A child of five could understand this!  Fetch me a child of five!