Subject: Re: bug#21472: 25.0.50; REGRESSION: (emacs) `Coding Systems' uses curly quotes for Lisp strings

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 12:15:25 -0700

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> This sentence:
>    On a decentralized version control system, push changes from the
>    current branch to another location.
>
> where "push" was quoted, is now reads like incorrect English

Why?  It's idiomatic English to talk about pushing changes in a dVCS.  See, for 
example, 
<http://docs.telerik.com/platform/appbuilder/version-control/third-party-vc/push-changes>, 
which says “You push changes from your local AppBuilder repository to your 
remote Git repository.”

>    The external border is normally not shown on fullboth and mazimized
>    frames.
>
> Previously, "fullboth", which is not a word, was quoted to indicate
> that it's not a real word.

As I understand it the section is intended to define “fullboth” as an invented 
English word, which is fine: the invented word should be defined with @dfn 
(which quotes the word in info files), and other uses of the word should appear 
unquoted just like any other word.  This is standard English style.  The manual 
should not quote every use of a neologism, as scare quotes are not a good style 
for a manual.

That being said, there were problems with the section: it did not use @dfn to 
define “fullboth”, and the paragraph defining “fullboth” was written awkwardly. 
  I just now installed a followup patch to fix that.  I added index entries 
while I was at it.

> Many places have a quoted text replaced by @dfn, although there's no
> terminology here that we describe or index.

Examples?  I put in @dfn when I thought the text was defining a term.

Indexing is a separate axis.  If the text uses a term that should be indexed, 
the index entry should be created regardless of whether the text surrounds a 
term with @dfn or with ``...'' or with nothing at all.  By and large my recent 
large patch worried about quoting, not about indexing.