Re: Emacs 26.1 release branch created

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul.

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 12:11:02 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 09/19/2017 11:34 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > So for now, I think we should leave things as they are and wait for
> > feedback.

A few days ago, somebody on the help list complained that his quotes
were being messed up in help messages.  Eli answered him by explaining
about curly quotes, and what Emacs does with ASCII quotes.  That much is
not in the manual.

> To address some of Alan's concerns, how about adding a brief note to the 
> user manual, in its section "Display Custom" that already says 
> "Beginning users can skip [this section]" and that already mentions 
> things like tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors that are meant for 
> expert users. Something like the attached, perhaps?

No, nothing like the attached.  I doubt you'll be surprised at all, but
that fails to address my concerns.

My main concern at the moment is my belief that you have been and are
attempting to maximise the difficulty faced by Emacs users in disabling
curly quotes.  I would appreciate clarification on this point.  I would
appreciate even more a clear statement that this isn't the case, and
that you will work together with me to make it as easy as possible for
users who might so wish to disable substitution of ` and ' by curly
quotes.


> >>From dab4b8b8fe444412ac017278ee4c801f2fe6fb24 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 12:08:37 -0700
> Subject: [PATCH] Mention text-quoting-style in user manual

> * doc/emacs/display.texi (Display Custom):
> Document text-quoting-style, briefly.
> Lack of documentation noted by Alan Mackenzie in:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-09/msg00632.html
> ---
>  doc/emacs/display.texi | 9 +++++++++
>  1 file changed, 9 insertions(+)

> diff --git a/doc/emacs/display.texi b/doc/emacs/display.texi
> index 2aa79e1161..878632692e 100644
> --- a/doc/emacs/display.texi
> +++ b/doc/emacs/display.texi
> @@ -1839,6 +1839,15 @@ Display Custom
>  @code{tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors} with a non-@code{nil}
>  argument to suppress the effect of bold-face in this case.

> +@vindex text-quoting-style
> +  Emacs infers how to quote in messages, help and info by examining
> +its environment.  By default, Emacs quotes @t{???like this???} with curved
> +single quotes if displayable, and @t{`like this'} with grave accent
> +and apostrophe otherwise.  If the default does not work for you, you
> +can override it by setting the variable @code{text-quoting-style}.
> +@xref{Keys in Documentation,, Substituting Key Bindings in
> +Documentation, elisp, The GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual}.
> +
>  @vindex display-raw-bytes-as-hex
>    Raw bytes are displayed in octal format by default, for example a
>  byte with a decimal value of 128 is displayed as @code{\200}.  To
> -- 
> 2.13.5

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).