Re: text-quoting-style

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul

On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 09:27:18AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> >> It's what Emacs does now, and it works well enough.  And the basic idea
> >> >isn't a new principle: Emacs has done it for decades for many ASCII
> >> >characters, e.g., HT.  So it is not a problem in practice.
> > It will be a problem in practice.  It will by lying about what character
> > in the buffer the glyph on the screen represents.

> Again, there's nothing new here: Emacs has been "lying" in that way for decades 
> for HT and for several other ASCII characters, and it works in practice.

Pure sophistry.

> >   It will be ambiguous: seeing a ' on the screen leaves it doubtful
> >   what the corresponding character in the buffer is.  Current uses of
> >   display tables aren't used to confuse users.

> That's easily enough fixed.  I installed the attached patch, which uses shadow 
> glyphs for quote substitutions in ASCII-only displays.

I don't know what shadow glyphs are, and don't particularly care - they're
irrelevant.  As I've said more times than I can count, the problem is
that curly quotes are used in help buffers, messages, etc., not the way
they get displayed.  I solved that problem by introducing
`text-quoting-style', and you have reintroduced the problem by removing
`text-quoting-style'.

Please come up with an actual solution, not an irrelevance.  Or else put
`text-quoting-style' back again.

> If you prefer underline or some other glyph face on your console please
> feel free to change the code.

> >> text-quoting-style doesn't do anything for info files, or
> >> for other text files containing curved quotes.

> > That's an argument for an additional facility for Info not one for
> > getting rid of `text-quoting-style', unless the replacement can do
> > the job of `text-quoting-style'.

> The additional facility I proposed would work for info, and would also work for 
> *Help* buffers and diagnostics

For what value of "work"?  Will it enable the quoting behaviour to be
configured to be the same as in Emacs-24.5?  It not, it's no good.

>and would render text-quoting-style unnecessary.

`text-quoting-style' is necessary.  Please put it back, or replace it
with something which works properly.

[ patch read and snipped ].

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).