Re: quote in help code example

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Oct 13, 2009, 20:15 UTC
Message-ID: <200910132215.46840.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <20091013153031.GX23777@genesis.frugalware.org>

Miklos Vajna wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 10:06:23PM +0800, bill lam <cbill.lam@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2. now the .ft pair fixed but it still displayed incorrect quote.
> > 
> >  git filter-branch --tree-filter ´rm filename´ HEAD
> > 
> > it should be 'rm filename' not ´rm filename´
> 
> I can reproduce that here as well, that's how it is in the official
> manpages as well (see the man branch), so that's not specific to your
> system.

Same here. The patch below is a band-aid fix that works for me, but I'd rather have it tested on various docbook/asciidoc combinations if anyone still runs them.

My findings so far were that asciidoc correctly turns the apostrophe into an ' entity in the .xml output, and xmlto then turns it into \' instead of just ' in the troff output. Then, if the terminal appears to support Unicode (this can be disabled with LC_ALL=C or such) the formatter turns it into a "real" apostrophe that, of course, is not understood by any ASCII-based tool.

So far so good, and sounded like an easy debugging job, right? Not so. The buzzword-compliance people apparently felt it would be nice to wrap a bad joke of a language in the bad joke of a language that XML already is, and thus was XSL invented. Deep in the horrors of these XSL files, in my case in

  /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/1.75.2/manpages/other.xsl

there's a template that, according to the comment near it, maltreats our apostrophes:

  * The backslash, dot, dash, and apostrophe (\, ., -, ') characters
  * have special meaning for roff, so before we do any other
  * processing, we must escape those characters where they appear in
  * the source content.

The patch below just replaces said template with a no-op for git's manpage creation. I have not been able to substantiate the claim that apostrophes are special, and in fact with the patch my manpages look fine. Then again I don't know anything about roff syntax either, and manuals seem a bit hard to come by.

Grrr.

diff --git i/Documentation/manpage-base.xsl w/Documentation/manpage-base.xsl
index a264fa6..7c14469 100644
--- i/Documentation/manpage-base.xsl
+++ w/Documentation/manpage-base.xsl
@@ -7,6 +7,11 @@
 <xsl:param name="man.output.quietly" select="1"/>
 <xsl:param name="refentry.meta.get.quietly" select="1"/>
 
+<xsl:template name="escape.apostrophe">
+  <xsl:param name="content"/>
+  <xsl:value-of select="$content"/>
+</xsl:template>
+
 <!-- convert asciidoc callouts to man page format;
      git.docbook.backslash and git.docbook.dot params
      must be supplied by another XSL file or other means -->

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch