Subject: bug#20385: [PATCH] Support curved quotes in doc strings

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 13:49:42 +0300

On 05/14/2015 06:24 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> The main motivation is that English text shouldn't use grave accent to
> quote. It looked good decades ago but the underlying encodings changed
> and now it is klunky and offputting.  (It's not as bad as the 1950s
> syntax 16HTHIS IS A STRING but that's a low bar....)  Yes, it was a GNU
> tradition for many years, but other GNU packages (GCC, coreutils, etc.)
> have largely shifted away from it and it's time Emacs made it more
> convenient to use the more-standard convention of curved quotes.

The other GNU packages have transitioned to using the straight 
apostrophes though, didn't they?

> I haven't tried font locking.  As I understand it, though, font locking
> would address the problem only in doc strings.  For example, it wouldn't
> address Emacs's diagnostic messages, which also need to get fixed.  In
> contrast, the sorts of solutions I'm proposing should help support
> curved quotes nearly everywhere.

The diagnostic messages can be treated differently (use fancy quotes, 
since we know this text will appear to the user as-is), or whatever code 
outputs diagnostics could convert the ASCII quotes to the fancy ones 
on-the-fly.

> The patch proposed in Bug#20545 largely addresses this problem.
> Contributors can use the same keypresses as before.  If your
> contributors type this:

Ah, sorry, that's better. I was under the impression, from a related 
discussion, that we'll need to type something like `C-x 8 ''.

> I reproduced that problem in Thunderbird by visiting "View > Character
> Encoding > Auto-Detect" and selecting "Russian".  To fix it, I selected
> "(off)" instead of "Russian".

Thank you. Indeed, that is it. As a Russian speaker, though, I'm not 
going to turn it off.