Re: [PATCH 06/14] prctl.2: ffix quotation mark tweaks

From: Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com>
To: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-man@vger.kernel.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 06/14] prctl.2: ffix quotation mark tweaks
Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 12:51:15 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200513115115.GM21779@arm.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <f575e35d-cd5e-5808-bed4-91bdfb9c2905@gmail.com>

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 01:46:22PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> On 5/13/20 1:39 PM, Dave Martin wrote:
> > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:11:21PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> >> Hello Dave,
> >>
> >> On 5/12/20 6:36 PM, Dave Martin wrote:
> >>> Convert quote marks used for information terms in prose to use
> >>> \(oq .. \(cq, for better graphical rendering.
> >>>
> >>> Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com>
> >>
> >> Again, this is a patch that I would prefer to see near the end 
> >> of a series, rather than in the middle.
> >>
> >> I'm currently agnostic about this change. But, I do not
> >> want to apply this patch, since no other pages in man-pages
> >> use \(oq...\(cq.
> >>
> >> I haven't applied this patch. Luckily, that does not prevent
> >> any of the later patches applying.
> > 
> > I'll be careful to move this sort of thing to the end of a series in
> > future.
> > 
> > This was a provocative patch, so I'm happy for it to be dropped.
> > 
> > 
> > The main motivation was that ' renders to PostScript etc. as a closing
> > quote, which is fine for apostrophes but not fine for an opening quote
> > mark.  Most of the current quotes in here are actually ", but I don't
> > see an actual promise from groff that that renders as a neutral glyph
> > either, so it seemed best to avoid.  For now " does seem to be rendered
> > with a neutral glyph (i.e., neither opening or closing).
> 
> See my commit 11b0b31a14bd2c7dcb0cf7bc815b4c1887444a89, just pushed,
> which addresses the ' issues.
> 
> >>> ---
> >>>
> >>> Note, this can lead to misrendering on badly-configured systems.
> >>> However, many man pages do it.
> >>
> >> Can you say some more about this please?
> > 
> > Terminal character maps need to match LANG etc. in order for fancy
> > characters coming out of nroff to display correctly.
> > 
> > ssh attempts to send LANG across, but terminal sessions between systems
> > that have different locales installed can be a problem, as can dumb
> > serial links that don't magically pass the locale and terminal type
> > settings across.
> > 
> > The fact that I hit this problem a lot in some situations (particularly
> > the serial link case) suggested to me that fancy characters are
> > considered fine nowadays, but perhaps I'd need to dig into it some more
> > to understand the situation fully.
> 
> Thanks for the clarification.
> 
> > (There are one or two ' that should really be \(aq anyway, but I'll
> > try to address that separately.)
> 
> See above. I presume that patch is what you wanted?

Yup, works for me.

I'll keep an eye out for other instances, but those were the ones that
stood out.

Cheers
---Dave