[Dctrl-tools-devel] Bug#557964: Question about groff \`

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 04:16:58PM +0200, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> I noticed the following comment from you in the bug log for #184603:
> 
> "Yes, this matches the instructions for the use of \` in groff(7)."
> 
> where "this" appears to mean that \` should be used when a backtick is meant.
> But that manpage says:
> 
>        \`     The grave accent `; same as \(ga.  Unescaped: left quote, backquote
>               (ASCII 0x60).
> 
> which, to me, seems to indicate that an *unescaped* ` is the correct way to
> produce a backtick.
> 
> Can you please clarify?
> 
> (This is related to Debian bug #557964.)

I agree with you about the contents of the documentation, but
unfortunately:

  $ echo '`' | nroff -Tutf8 | grep .
  ‘
  $ echo '\`' | nroff -Tutf8 | grep .
  `

You may wish to bring this up upstream (groff at gnu.org) ...

Regarding #557964, please at least don't use \N'...'. That's definitely
incorrect and will probably cause problems with formatting on different
devices (e.g. things like PostScript/HTML rendering of manual pages).

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]