Re: [wl@gnu.org: changing line heights]

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

> The default ' and ` characters in the XFree86 4.x fonts I looked at*, by
> contrast, _are_ fairly easy to distinguish in my font -- the single-quote is
> a vertical line, and the back-single-quote is a sharply slanted line.  The
> shapes used might be considered ugly when used in the context of english text
> because they are not symmetrical, but I thing it's more important that they
> be easy to distinguish, as it's very important for programming (e.g., in the
> shell).

There's an excellent discussion of this whole quote problem by Markus 
Kuhn at:

   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

The problem here is that there's a clash between

- Unicode
- established GNU documentation practice

Unicode says that the characters 0x60 and 0x27 are a grave accent and a 
vertical quote, not an open and close quotation mark.  The XFree86 fonts 
are doing the right thing.  However, GNU documentation (info and doc 
strings) use them as open and close quotation marks.  It seems to me 
that the right solution is by default to map 0x60/0x27 to the Unicode 
quotation marks only in buffers displaying documentation (help and 
info); users should also be able to enable this mapping on a per-buffer
basis and globally.

James