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

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

> > `help-quote-translation' does seem to prevent curly quotes in
> > *Help* buffers, so at least there's that.  But I'm looking for
> > a switch to turn this virus OFF everywhere - to return to
> > Classic Emacs.  Surely such a simple ON/OFF switch exists?
> 
> It doesn't.  What you see in Info is literal characters generated
> when the documentation is built during the Emacs build process.
> So, to change that, you will have to regenerate the documentation, 
> telling makeinfo not to produce Unicode characters there.
> 
> Alternatively, you can set up your standard-display-table to display
> those characters as their ASCII equivalents.

That's horrible.  Users should be able to control this, easily.

I don't see this problem in a Windows binary from 2014-11-30.  The
regression was apparently introduced to the Windows builds between
then and 2014-12-29.

It sounds like this is a makeinfo build-time configuration decision.
In that case, can Emacs please provide doc produced both ways, and
let users choose the appearance they want?  At least please make the
non-curlified doc available as a separate download, with releases.

Both doc alternatives could be separate downloads, with Emacs
imposing no prejudice wrt bundling.  The download site could also
let users choose which they want, and automatically download both
the code tarball sans doc and the chosen doc format.

A display-table hack would presumably change all uses of a curly
quote.  That's not appropriate - it is only the code-"quoting"
uses that need to be changable/configurable by a user.  And if
this is not really a problem then please provide users with a
runtime choice, which fiddles with the display table as needed.

Code-"quoting" (inline code display) is a final presentation
thing.  It should not be, in effect, hardcoded.

If Texinfo/makeinfo is as inflexible as you suggest, maybe it
really is time to move to XML/HTML with XSLT/CSS.  Presentation
should be separated from content/structure, and that is apparently
not the case now.  There should be some flexibility in how a given
semantic construct, such as inline code, is finally presented.

There has been a lot of noise about "modernizing" Emacs's
appearance, behind the move to use curly quotes.  Modernizing
Emacs's appearance, including its doc, should first of all mean
separating out presentation from content/structure.  Whether the
fault for this regression is with Texinfo/makeinf or Emacs core
code changes, this "modernization" puts the cart before the
horse, and is a step backward for users.