Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Stefan.

On Wed, Sep 02, 2015 at 12:07:03AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Just to emphasize that `...' quoting is not at all ugly on my terminal -
> > in fact, it's rather elegant.

> Indeed, the font I see in my Linux console renders them OK
> (pre-XFree86-4 style), but I think you're sadly in a minority.

There's nothing sad about being in a minority.  Anybody who runs Emacs
with her own .emacs is in a minority of one.  Anybody who runs Emacs on
a platform that isn't GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows or an Apple Mac is
also in a minority.  For that matter, anybody running Emacs at all is in
a minority.

> > However, using curly quotes is problematic.  I run on a Linux
> > virtual terminal.

> Curly quotes render just fine in my Linux console.  So it looks like
> you're in an even smaller minority.

Using my  standard font, lat1-16, the curly quotes use the same glyphs as
` and ', hence are visibly indistinguishable from them.  I tried
creating my own glyphs for the curlies, and put them into a font,
discarding two French-language glyphs to make room.  They're ugly, but
more importantly, my eye can't reliably distinguish a standard quote
glyph from one of my new curly ones unless there's already a known quote
on the screen to compare it with.

But the ordinary user of a console is not going to have the time or
inclination to go mucking around with fonts.

> > So, PLEASE can we have adequate configurability, so that the user can
> > decide for herself what's ugly, and whether it needs "fixing".

> My request here is to figure out what *kind* of configurability is best.
> Not whether configurability is desired.  But you're not very forthcoming
> with information about the concrete problems you see with curly quotes,
> so we're likely not going to be able to provide the best kind of
> customizability for you.

All of what I write above I've written before.  In addition, the
necessity to type a C-x 8 combination to type a curly quote is a serious
impediment.  (For me, remapping ` and ' to things which aren't
self-insert-command (or an electric command) is so inelegant as not to
come into consideration).

The sort of customisability I'm asking for is that in which the user
decides whether ASCII or curly quoting characters are used in *Help*,
messages, etc.

>         Stefan

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).