Re: text-quoting-style

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul.

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:48:10AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > The reason for its existence still holds.  Or is there some other
> > mechanism which achieves the same thing?

> I suggested the mechanism of setting the locale, which is needed anyway in an 
> environment that can't display non-ASCII characters.

I think you're referring to this paragraph:

>>> It would simplify things somewhat to remove the text-quoting-style
>>> variable, and to have Emacs behave as it does now when
>>> text-quoting-style is nil: namely, generate curved quotes in buffers
>>> and strings if displayable, and generate grave accent and apostrophe
>>> otherwise.  That should suffice for Alan's preferences, as he can
>>> run Emacs in an environment where curved quotes aren't displayable,
>>> e.g., with LC_ALL=C in the environment.

That's no good to me - I need to be able to read and type Latin-1
characters (specifically, £, ä, ö, ü, ß, Ä, Ö, Ü, and probably one or
two others), yet I don't want curly quotes.

Let me emphasise that again, I don't _WANT_ curly quotes: even if
they're perfectly capable of being displayed on my environment (which
they probably are when I'm in X-Windows) I still don't want them.  We've
discussed the reasons in some depth already.

And if I change my mind suddenly, I want to be able to enable them
readily.

> That is, curved quote characters would still be transformed to grave
> accent and apostrophe in the *Help* buffers, which I think was your
> main goal; it's just that the text-quoting-style variable wouldn't be
> needed.

I think it is needed.  Fiddling around with the locale, trying to
eliminate curlies whilst retaining all wanted characters, is going to
lead to frustration, anger, and refusal to update to the latest version
of Emacs.  The locale is too blunt an instrument for this.

> Something like the attached change to the manual, say, with corresponding 
> changes elsewhere.

[ patch fragments read, but snipped.  Thanks! ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).