Re: [PATCH v2] Quote ' as \(aq in manpages

From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 21, 2009, 21:42 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0910211733310.5105@dr-wily.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <7a3e6c8c5a11e14c19bc1a27608dcc78171c9feb.1256151199.git.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Thomas Rast wrote:

> Unfortunately, as Anders Kaseorg kindly pointed out, this is not 
> portable beyond groff, so we add an extra Makefile variable GNU_ROFF 
> which you need to enable to get the new quoting.

Note that GNU_ROFF is a property of the target system on which the manpages will be read, unlike the existing variables (ASCIIDOC8, DOCBOOK_XSL_172, ASCIIDOC_NO_ROFF) which are properties of the host system on which they are built.

Show 7 quoted lines

> To save you the effort of clicking the links, the header definitions 
> would be
>
> .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq
> .el .ds Aq '
>
> and you then have to change the template to quote to \(Aq instead.

If someone knows how to get this definition into the header, that would be preferable, because then you could read the same manpage on both GNU and non-GNU systems instead of building separately for each.

It would be even better if someone would work with the Docbook developers to get this fixed upstream. (Unfortunately, there has been no reply to my comment in their bug tracker.)

Anders