Re: Why backquotes in GNU documentation?

[Miles Bader]

Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Some fonts have the apostrophe represented by, approximately speaking,
> the mirror image of the grave accent.  In that case `htonl' looks like
> it has balanced quotes.
>
> These days ‘single’ and “double” quotes are available in Unicode.

Unicode quotes look better (on unicode-capable displays[*]), but also
make things much more annoying for any kind of programmatic handling of
the output.  The standard ` and ' are a reasonable compromise, I think.

[*] Well _usually_ look better... I've noticed cases where unicode
quotes are rendered so lightly that they end up being almost invisible...

-Miles

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