RE: How to opt out of curly-quote spamming altogether?

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > In that case, can Emacs please provide doc produced both ways, and
> > let users choose the appearance they want?
> 
> That would make for more complexity and size in maintenance,
> distribution and installation, for little benefit to most users.

You decide how much benefit it is to users?  How about letting
them decide, themselves?  Give them the choice, please.

> With either the old or the new info quoting styles you need to
> translate quotes when copying to StackExchange, so I suggest
> writing a bit of specialized Elisp code to translate these quotes
> exactly the way you like.

Not interested.  And no, I don't use Emacs for this.  I will
continue to manually copy and paste, even if curly quotes make
the quote-mark fixup twice the effort.

I typically provide a link to the appropriate node in the online
(HTML) manual, and I quote a portion of the text from that node in
the post.  Had Emacs chosen `...` instead of curly quotes, as Andreas
suggested several times (likely tongue-in-cheek), there would be
no change needed.

And had Emacs left its classic `...' in place, there would be only
half as many quote changes needed.  I will make such changes, but
I doubt if many other SE users will bother to.  The result will be
that inline code will *not* be set off as different from ordinary
text in such posts.  Emacs doc will look worse in this context, and
more importantly, code fragments (function names and such) will
not stand out at all, detracting from reader understanding.

But this is a minor point.  The real point in this connection
is that such setting-off of inline code fragments is semantic.

Different systems use different syntax/techniques to do it.
Choosing curly quotes for this is about the worst thing Emacs
could do - they are used pretty much nowhere for this purpose,
and for good reason: curly quotes quote ordinary text.  They are
not a good vehicle for setting off inline code.

This is the case whether you realize it now or not.  The question
is not just one of looking "modern" by showing that Emacs too can
use curly quotes.  That's a sad attempt to show how "modern" Emacs
is, I'm afraid.  Emacs will get no converts because the "retro look"
of `...' is replaced by the "modern" curly-quoting of inline code.