Re: text-quoting-style

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> E.g. text-quoting-style doesn't prevent the existence of curly quotes in
> Emacs, so for some interpretation of the above it's not sufficient.

I think Alan was mainly annoyed by three things in the initial implementation of 
curved quotes in docstrings.

1.  They didn't display well enough on his Linux kernel console to satisfy him.

2.  It's painful for him to search for strings containing curved quotes.

3.  When he copies from *Help* and/or *Message* buffers into other buffers, he 
wants the copied text to be in grave style `like this' rather than in curve 
style ‘like this’.


Here's one possible alternative to ‘text-quoting-style’ to address these three 
problems.

(1) is fixed by using display tables to display curved quotes in grave style. 
(This has already been implemented and no change should be needed here.)

(2) is fixed by enabling character-fold-search.  This isn't the default yet, due 
to a few problems with its implementation, but these should be fixable.

(3) could be fixed by transliterating quotes when they're yanked, if the user 
sets a variable to do this transliteration.

This alternative would be superior to what we have now, because it would also 
work for info files (which aren't handled by Emacs's current scheme).