From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:01:11 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Quote ' as \(aq in manpages
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0910211357160.5105@dr-wily.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <ab31eb03b25272341b91e1f1132dab9d8a49e5b6.1256113282.git.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Thomas Rast wrote:
> The docbook/xmlto toolchain insists on quoting ' as \'.  This does
> achieve the quoting goal, but modern 'man' implementations turn the
> apostrophe into a unicode "proper" apostrophe (given the right
> circumstances), breaking code examples in many of our manpages.
> 
> Quote them as \(aq instead, which is an "apostrophe quote" as per the
> groff_char manpage.

\(aq is not portable to non-GNU roff.  See
  http://bugs.debian.org/507673#65
  http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2412738&group_id=21935&atid=373747
for a proposed portable solution.

Anders