Drew Adams wrote:

> Does it restore the behavior as it was - everywhere?

Yes and no.  It does restore behavior for doc strings in traditional format that 
uses grave accent and apostrophe to quote.  However, it does transliterate 
curved quotes in doc strings to grave accent and apostrophe, which is new. 
Presumably any such doc strings are recent introductions so this caveat 
shouldn't affect traditional usage.

> This feature should be opt-in, not opt-out, IMHO.

No, let's enable it in environments where it seems to work.  That's what other 
GNU projects do (GCC, coreutils, etc.).  The new feature is disabled by default 
in traditional environments that can't display curved quotes; that should be 
good enough.

> Please consider also changing the option values so that
> you can use `M-x set-variable` in a reasonable way (i.e.,
> without needing to know that ?` is 96 etc. - you cannot
> type ?` at the prompt).  Character values are not helpful
> in such a context.

Alan made a similar suggestion a while ago, and it's easy enough to implement. 
Done in the attached patch, which I pushed just now.

> Also, why is the name about "translation"?  Shouldn't
> this option just be about what style is used for quoting
> Emacs terms?

That point has also been made.  I changed the name to 'text-quoting-style' in 
the attached patch.  Although it's just a name, it does have uses outside help 
buffers so at least the 'help' part of the name was misleading.  Other Emacs 
packages (e.g., coreutils) use "quoting-style" but that's too generic for Emacs 
which has other interpretation of the word "quoting".

> FWIW: The doc string of `substitute-command-keys' is
> not too bad.  But I find it confusing that it refers
> to "left and right quote characters" as something other
> than the "quotation mark" character referred to in the
> doc of `help-quote-translation'.

I don't see the confusion, quite possibly because I'm too close to the code. 
Suggestions for improved wording would be welcome.