single quotes in the manpage

Paul Slootman paul+rsync at wurtel.net
Thu May 15 20:54:49 EST 2003


On Thu 15 May 2003, Wayne Davison wrote:

> On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:20:16AM +0200, Paul Slootman wrote:
> > In the manpage, all occurrences of a single quote (or apostrophe) are
> > preceded by a backslash.
> 
> This is a yodl thing -- we use normal apostrophes in the .yo file, and
> the yodl2man script turns them into \' sequences.  I don't see an option
> to turn this off, so if we think this is something that should be
> changed, we'd probably have to tweak the Makefile rule to add a
> sed-filter step after yodl2man.

Hmmm...

In the meantime I was also referred to Debian bug #186319 (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=186319) which points
out that it would also be better to use \- where a real minus char is
meant (i.e. for options), as a plain - may be converted to a hyphen in
UTF-8 locales (meaning that the examples can't be cut & pasted). Also it
suggests using \(lq \(rq for left and right double quotes and \(oq \(cq
for left and right single quotes, so that they come out right when
rendered on devices that support them (tty output will still show plain
ascii quotes).

If yodl is getting in the way of this, then yodl presumably isn't the
right (complete) tool for its intended purpose...  Replacing the
characters on
the fly will be pretty difficult with any sort of script, as the context
determines whether it should be a literal quote (or dash, or whatever)
or a typesetting quote etc.


Paul Slootman



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