gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/16/87)
rbutterworth@watmath.UUCP (Ray Butterworth) writes: > Some terminals and printers have begun displaying it > as a left-quote... Judging > by many of the net articles, this practice seems to be becoming quite > popular. (On a standard terminal, the text appears to look more like > ~~quote'' than what was intended though. It is quite ugly anyway.) This is probably due to troff, which is too stupid to be able to tell whether a " is an opening or closing doublequote, and forces people to use `` and '' instead. Maybe SoftQuad (the only people who are doing development on troff, it seems) will fix this. [Followups should skip comp.lang.c, they don't care about this!] -- John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu /* No comment */
Juanita_Aydelotte.XSIS@xerox.com (01/20/87)
Point of interest. Troff uses a `` (two single quotes) instead of a " (double quote) because hot metal linotype machines, earlier version typesetters, and some of the newer phototypesetters and lasertypesetters of today requires the two single quotes. This is not a bug in the software. If I remember correctly, sometimes font "tables" can be adjusted so troff will automatically convert the double quote to two single quotes.