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Re: [Groff] Using \(aq in plain English words--bad idea?


From: Anthony J. Bentley
Subject: Re: [Groff] Using \(aq in plain English words--bad idea?
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 09:49:15 -0600

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Schwarze writes:
>    Accents
>      In output modes supporting such special output characters, for
>      example -T pdf, some roff(7) formatters convert the following
>      ASCII input characters to the following Unicode special output
>      characters:
> 
>         `      U+2018   left single quotation mark
>         '      U+2019   right single quotation mark
>         ~      U+02DC   small tilde
> 
>      In prose, this automatic substitution is often desirable; but
>      when these characters have to be displayed as plain ASCII
>      characters, for example in source code samples, they require
>      escaping to render as follows:
> 
>         \(ga   U+0060   grave accent
>         \(aq   U+0027   apostrophe
>         \(ti   U+007E   tilde
> 
> So yes, documentation kind of recommends "Don\(aqt listen".

Prose does not fall under this category. "Source code samples" is a
pretty limited category in my book.

> Arguably, apostrophes are at least as common in english prose
> as single quotes, so the decision to make single quotes easier
> to type at the expense of making apostophes harder to type
> could have been questioned.

Unicode made the decision a long time ago to consider U+2019 as both
right single quotation mark and apostrophe; see the Apostrophes section
of Unicode 9.0, chapter 6. This matches up with the usage I've seen
ever since becoming interested in typography.

    When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as
    apostrophe, but only U+0027 is present on most keyboards. Software
    commonly offers a facility for automatically converting the U+0027
    APOSTROPHE to a contextually selected curly quotation glyph. ...

    U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred where the character
    is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: "We've been
    here before." In this latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a
    punctation apostrophe.

TeX, for example, does the same thing. There, the conversion to U+2019
is done for text, but in math ' is converted to U+2032 PRIME. (Well,
TeX predates Unicode, but you know what I mean.)

Thus, I typically escape ' in source code listings and other situations
where I need the literal ASCII character '. But when I need an actual
apostrophe, I use ' as-is to take advantage of troff's automatic
conversion. Similarly, I only use " when specifically an ASCII double
quote is needed, such as when referring to C strings, and use
typographic quotes at all other times.

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley



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