groff(7): ESCq: slanted quote (closing quote)

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Branden,

After Ingo mentioned \N'9' for writing a tab (ASCII HT), I read the docs 
about it, which surprisingly show:

\N’n’

Caused by:

.de ESCq
.  Text "\f[CB]\e\\$1\[cq]\f[]\,\f[I]\\$2\/\f[]\f[CB]\[cq]\f[]"
..

I guessed groff(1) expects one to use unslanted quotes, and that pasting 
that would fail, but it doesn't; the following page unexpectedly works:

.TH a b c d
.SH Slanted
a\N’9’b
.SH Unslanted
a\N'9'b

I then found the following, which would document this:

       '      [...]

              As a second task, it is the most commonly used ar‐
              gument separator in  some  functional  escape  se‐
              quences  (but  any  pair of characters not part of
              the argument do work).  [...]

On one hand, it is nice to show that one can use anything as the 
argument separator in those escape sequences.  On the other hand, it 
seems a bit confusing to me (but not so much that I couldn't find it 
myself).  Was it on purpose?  Is it a portable thing?  If not, it might 
be better to show examples with \(aq.

Cheers,

Alex


--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature