bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors

[Paul Eggert]

>>> we don't control Info output
>
>> Actually, we do control it, and can easily tell makeinfo to output 
straight
>> ASCII quotes.
>
> Can we?

I'm sure we can, though I'm too lazy to look it up right now.  And we 
can transliterate the .info files ourselves, though that would be just 
as silly.

> The abstract principle at work here is that ASCII quotes are
> @dfn{working} characters, whereas the curly quotes are merely
> @dfn{display} characters.

Curved single quotes are also "working" characters, both in Emacs 
(master branch) and in Texinfo (latest stable version).  It's true that 
not every keyboard can generate them in every Emacs context with just a 
single keypress, but that's also true for many ASCII characters.  In 
practice the data entry problem is not that big a deal.

> I meant change the appearance of your 0x27 apostrophe

It's not my apostrophe.  It's the appearance of U+0027 APOSTROPHE in 
most environments nowadays.  You may not like its appearance, and I may 
not like it either, but it's a waste of our time to reargue this now.  
The appearance has been common practice for many years, and Emacs should 
work well out of the box in common and standard environments.

> Yes, the single curly quotes are "hard linked" to the ASCII single
> quotes in the font.  That isn't acceptable for me - they should have
> distinct glyphs if they're going to be there at all.

That's easy enough.  Just take lat1-16.psfu and run this shell script:

  (psfgettable lat1-16.psfu
   echo '0x0c3 U+2018'
   echo '0x0c9 U+2019'
   echo '0x0d3 U+201C'
   echo '0x0d9 U+201D') |
  psfaddtable lat1-16.psfu - lat1cq-16.psfu
  gzip -9n lat1cq-16.psfu

I'll attach the resulting font file, so you can save it and run 
'setfont' on it.  This font provides easy-to-distinguish glyphs for 
curved quotes (both single and double), and it retains the appearance of 
all ASCII characters in the font you've expressed a preference for.  
Most users won't need this sort of thing of course -- I'm just trying to 
help create a font that meets your specific needs.

> So, it's going to be a pain in the posterior for most, if not all, users
> of Emacs on terminals,

No, it works fine for users of Emacs on terminals in most environments 
(gnome-terminal, xterm, etc.).  It works fine even on most Linux 
consoles, where curved single quotes display as curved single quotes out 
of the box.  Ordinary users shouldn't have to fiddle with font files; 
things just work.

lat1cq-16.psfu.gz
Description: application/gzip