Re: How to avoid a "basic" single quote being replaced by a "curvy" one?

[Karl Berry]

    Any idea why?

People also want to print physical books from PDFs.  And it seemed
better for the default output to be the same whether TeX is used to
produce DVI or PDF.  (I believe the text should still be a live link.)

Anyway, you can go back to showing just the text, without the url, by
putting this at the top of the document:

@tex
\global\urefurlonlylinktrue
@end tex

karl

P.S. As for the "spacey" url, TeX is just doing what it's told to break
the lines.  Some people want automated line breaking no matter how awful
the output is, other people want really nice output and are willing to
tweak the text.  The default settings are a compromise between those two.