Bug#488213: groff-base: Escaped version of apostroph (\') does not display in ISO-8859-15 locale

[G. Branden Robinson]

I reiterate (after ~17 months) that the suggestion in this bug report is
ill-advised.

ISO 8859-15 (Latin-9) simple _has_ no code point for the acute accent,
any more than ASCII does.

Further, as Jakub Wilk pointed out, it's just plain wrong semantics to
use the \' escape sequence to obtain any form of quotation mark.  All
known *roffs going back to Osanna's 1973 troff define this escape
sequence as representing an acute accent.

Any man page that uses \' to attempt to obtain a quotation mark is in
error.

I suggesting tagging this bug "wontfix" and closing it.

Regards,
Branden


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Bug#488213: groff-base: Escaped version of apostroph (\') does not display in ISO-8859-15 locale

[G. Branden Robinson]

If this bug report is asking for a latin9 output driver for groff, it's
should be retitle and moved to wishlist severity.

If it's asking for the semantics of \' to change from acute accent, it's
wontfix.

Regards,
Branden


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Bug#488213: groff-base: Escaped version of apostroph (\') does not display in ISO-8859-15 locale

[Jakub Wilk]

* Arjan Opmeer arjan.opm...@gmail.com, 2008-06-27, 08:39:
There are manpages that use \' (the escaped version of the apostroph) 
to get pretty quotes around words. However \' maps to the acute 
accent 


It's not a bug, it's a documented feature:

`prints as ‘ (left single quotation mark)
'prints as ’ (right single qutation mark)
\`   prints as ` (grave accent)
\'   prints as ´ (acute accent)
\(aq prints as ' (apostrophe)

--
Jakub Wilk



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Bug#488213: groff-base: Escaped version of apostroph (\') does not display in ISO-8859-15 locale

[Arjan Opmeer]

Package: groff-base
Version: 1.18.1.1-20
Severity: normal

There are manpages that use \' (the escaped version of the apostroph) to get
pretty quotes around words. However \' maps to the acute accent which is
not present in ISO-8859-15 (and some other LatinX variants). Thus the next
command in the pipeline 'iconv -c -f ISO-8859-1 -t ISO-8859-15' happily
strips out those characters.

Which gives some interesting results when this happens to be in a piece of
text that must be rendered bold. On the terminal this is accomplished by
using overstriking meaning every character is printed twice with a backspace
in between. However when some characters are stripped out by iconv there are
stray backspaces left that eat away the remaining text!

Example:

   env LC_ALL=en_US.ISO-8859-15 man smartd.conf

and see the explanation for the -l option. Notice how

   ...by using the '-t short' and '-t long' options...

gets truncated to

   ...by using the-t shor and-t lon options...

Clearly not a very desirable result. Maybe a new mdoc.local rule can be
added like so:

   .  if '\*[.T]'latin1' \
   .char \' \N'39'

to always map the \' (escaped apostroph) back to the single ' (apostroph)
for the latin1 output device. For UTF8 locales the pretty quotes remain
intact. For the ascii output device the escaped apostrophs already get
mapped back to the single ones.


Arjan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.23.14 (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages groff-base depends on:
ii  libc6 2.7-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libgcc1   1:4.3.1-2  GCC support library
ii  libstdc++64.3.1-2The GNU Standard C++ Library v3

groff-base recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information



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