Re: `' quotes in messages (was Re: Success (mostly) with the testsuite)

[Russ Allbery]

Raja R Harinath <address@hidden> writes:

> On a tangent, do we still want to use `...' quotes?  The latest XFree86
> fonts do not show these as symmetric open and close quotes.  The "`" is
> more slanted, and the "'" looks like on the PC (a vertical quote, which
> can be used for both open and close).

See <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html> for an extensive
argument on this subject which convinced me, even though I'm really
annoyed by it.  I think Unicode *totally* screwed this up, but we're not
going to manage to fix it and we may as well bite the bullet.

The above URL also explains why XFree86 4.0 made this change, which was
incompatible with previous X fonts.  I prefer the way that earlier X fonts
handled it, but they got outvoted by the PC world which ended up winning
in the Unicode spec, basically.  :/

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>