Re: ASCII-only startup message?

[Paul Eggert]

Drew Adams wrote:
> Emacs should
> (continue to) use U+0027 (ASCII apostrophe) as apostrophe (in its
> own doc

The Emacs source code largely does that already, so I assume you’re talking 
about how the documentation is presented to the user. It would be a nontrivial 
project to change Emacs in the way you suggest, as many of the punctuation 
apostrophes are in *info* buffers and are generated by Texinfo, which has taken 
the Unicode approach for consistency with longstanding English typographic 
conventions. Traditionally there is no textual distinction between punctuation 
apostrophes and right single quotation marks, just as there is no textual 
distinction between (say) parenthetical and redactive dashes, even though in 
both cases there are large semantic differences. English can be a messy 
language, but there it is.