From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: James Clark Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: [wl@gnu.org: changing line heights] Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:22:04 +0700 Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Message-ID: <3F7394BC.1070103@jclark.com> References: <86isni5yyh.fsf@gerd.free-bsd.org> <20030924.144951.177659448.wl@gnu.org> <86brta5noi.fsf@gerd.free-bsd.org> <20030925.104708.70197319.wl@gnu.org> <86r8259ooh.fsf@gerd.free-bsd.org> <20030926003720.GB3873@fencepost> NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1064539624 15715 80.91.224.253 (26 Sep 2003 01:27:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 01:27:04 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Gerd Moellmann , wl@gnu.org, Richard Stallman , emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Fri Sep 26 03:27:01 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1A2hNt-0003bc-00 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 03:27:01 +0200 Original-Received: from monty-python.gnu.org ([199.232.76.173]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1A2hVJ-0004WQ-00 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 03:34:41 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.22) id 1A2hNf-0005e7-Eg for emacs-devel@quimby.gnus.org; Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:26:47 -0400 Original-Received: from list by monty-python.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.22) id 1A2hNW-0005YA-LI for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:26:38 -0400 Original-Received: from mail by monty-python.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.22) id 1A2hNT-0005W1-Ul for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:26:36 -0400 Original-Received: from [203.130.150.186] (helo=server.bkk.thaiopensource.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.22) id 1A2hNK-0004bZ-5n; Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:26:30 -0400 Original-Received: from jclark.com ([203.130.150.187]) by server.bkk.thaiopensource.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h8Q1OxY27425; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:24:59 +0700 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Original-To: Miles Bader In-Reply-To: <20030926003720.GB3873@fencepost> X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.2 Precedence: list List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+emacs-devel=quimby.gnus.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:16653 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:16653 > The default ' and ` characters in the XFree86 4.x fonts I looked at*, by > contrast, _are_ fairly easy to distinguish in my font -- the single-quote is > a vertical line, and the back-single-quote is a sharply slanted line. The > shapes used might be considered ugly when used in the context of english text > because they are not symmetrical, but I thing it's more important that they > be easy to distinguish, as it's very important for programming (e.g., in the > shell). There's an excellent discussion of this whole quote problem by Markus Kuhn at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html The problem here is that there's a clash between - Unicode - established GNU documentation practice Unicode says that the characters 0x60 and 0x27 are a grave accent and a vertical quote, not an open and close quotation mark. The XFree86 fonts are doing the right thing. However, GNU documentation (info and doc strings) use them as open and close quotation marks. It seems to me that the right solution is by default to map 0x60/0x27 to the Unicode quotation marks only in buffers displaying documentation (help and info); users should also be able to enable this mapping on a per-buffer basis and globally. James