Jakub Wilk <ubanus@users.sf.net> writes: > * Nicolas Alvarez <nicolas.alvarez@gmail.com>, 2009-11-17, 13:45: > >And sometimes annoying. I have seen command examples in manpages that > >used fancy Unicode quotes, and didn't work when copied and pasted > >into a shell. > > Blame the one who wrote a buggy manpage, not groff. No, I really do think it's reasonable to blame the system in this instance. One should not need to go through contortions to get a common characters like an apostrophe (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) or the typographic quotation marks (U+2018, U+2019) to behave as themselves. Rendering a character as itself should be the norm, with only a very few well-chosen characters causing special behaviour. With groff, there is too much magic groff-knows-better second-guessing of the writer's intention going on. We may be stuck with it, but that doesn't make it right. -- \ “When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses | `\ over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and | _o__) its speaker a raving lunatic.” —Dresden James | Ben Finney
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