bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> The topic was specifically "message output".

OK.

> we don't control Info output

Actually, we do control it, and can easily tell makeinfo to output straight 
ASCII quotes.  Although that would have made sense in 1995, it doesn't make 
sense now, as makeinfo's default behavior of outputting curved quotes works 
better for ordinary usage today.

> you could fix that by fixing your fonts

No, that would disagree with common usage for these characters.  Almost 
everybody uses the current standard in this area, and it wouldn't be reasonable 
to require users to switch to long-obsolete font styles just to see decent output.

> That still displays double curly quotes as inverse question marks, though.

This is not a problem if the topic is specifically "message output", as only 
single quotes are being proposed for message output.  That being said, most 
likely your problem is because you told Emacs you were in a UTF-8 locale.  You 
can try setting LC_ALL=en_GB.iso885915 or something like that before starting Emacs.

But I'm not sure I would do that.  If I understand the rest of your message 
correctly, your environment already displays curved single quotes as nicely 
curved single quotes.  The main problem for message output is that you don't 
like the exact appearance of curved single quotes in your font and would prefer 
a different appearance and don't like any of the other fonts I've suggested and 
would rather fire up a font editor to get an appearance you like.  Although 
that's all fine of course, this appears to be mainly an issue of font style 
preference, which means it's an issue that does not block the proposed change.