#1022 man: escape.apostrophe wrongly escapes quotation marks

[Daniel Leidert]

By escaping an apostrophe (single quotation mark) you create a right sngle quotation mark `, not an apostrophe '. IMO the only way to correctly replace an apostrophe (a plain ' also prints as a right single quotation mark accordingly to groff_char(7)) is to replace it with

\[aq]

The patch is attached.

The issue has been sbumitted to the Debian BTS:
http://bugs.debian.org/507673

[Daniel Leidert]

proposed patch

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Do you know if this works as expected with AT&T troff (on Solaris or whatever)?

[Michael(tm) Smith]

I just tested on a Solaris box, and \[aq] does not produce an apostrophe with the troff there. I think the two-letter bracketed escape syntax maybe doesn't work at all with AT&T troff or its non-groff descendants.

So \[aq] is not a portable solution. There must be some way that's been used forever, since troff began, to represent an apostrophe -- some way other than \[aq]

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Note that \(aq does not work as expected on Solaris either (it prints nothing).

I also note that groff_char(7) does not say that \[aq] is an apostrophe -- it says it is a "quote single - apostrophe quote". But I guess that actually does mean a straight single apostrophe -- decimal 39. That is what we actually want, right?

Anyway, I can't see that the groff docs provide any information on how to generate that in a portable way.

Any ideas?

[Daniel Leidert]

No idea sorry. But if you take a look at the source of groff_char I find:

.\" groff
.if \n(.g

.\" non-groff
.if !\n(.g

Is this some kind of switch one can use? If yes, maybe this can be useful too for the other TROFF vs. GROFF issues/differences you were working on.

[Daniel Leidert]

Seems so:

`\n[.g]'
Always 1. Macros should use this to determine whether they are
running under GNU `troff'.

[Michael(tm) Smith]

I e-mailed the groff list to try to get some help with this. As far as I can see, \(aq should work as expected with the troff on OpenSolaris/SunOS. But it doesn't actually seem to.

Even if there is some alternative way that I can use to represent apostrophe on non-groff systems, the \n(.g conditional request thing is not going to help -- because I would need to do the condtional switching inline. That's one of the biggest deficiences in groff -- it has caused me problems in the past as well.

[Anders Kaseorg]

According to <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=458157>:

“With groff, what you want is \(aq. Unfortunately, that's groff-specific
and won't work with, for example, Solaris man.

Pod::Man adds:

.ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq
.el .ds Aq '

to the preamble of the man page and then uses \*(Aq as the escape for
apostrophes in the man page.”

Is this a sufficiently portable solution? I’ve tested it on GNU and Solaris.

[Anders Kaseorg]

The Debian maintainer Daniel Leidert has added a patch to docbook-xsl 1.75.2+dfsg-3 that implements the same solution as Pod::Man. I have successfully tested a resulting manpage on both GNU and Solaris systems.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=507673

Here’s the patch by itself. I believe it is now suitable for inclusion upstream:

http://web.mit.edu/andersk/Public/docbook-portable-apostrophe-fix.dpatch

[Mauritz Jeanson]

A fix for this issue has been added to the current codebase.
Please test the fix with the latest snapshot from:

http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/

[Mauritz Jeanson]

Thanks for the patch.

[SourceForge Robot]

This Tracker item was closed automatically by the system. It was
previously set to a Pending status, and the original submitter
did not respond within 14 days (the time period specified by
the administrator of this Tracker).