Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 20:17:49 +0200
> From: Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se>
> Cc: Brief Busters <dgutov@yandex.ru>, Stephen Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org>, acm@muc.de, eggert@cs.ucla.edu, 
> 	rms@gnu.org, Emacs Developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 5:43 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 15:02:56 +0200
> >> From: Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se>
> >> Cc: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, acm@muc.de, eggert@cs.ucla.edu,
> >>       rms@gnu.org, Emacs Developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> >>
> >> almost all professionally printed literature uses real quotation
> >> marks
> 
> > That's true, but most of them look quite differently from  “..”, at
> > least with most monospaced fonts.  So the issue is not as easy or
> > simple as you seem to imply.
> 
> Different from what?  Do you mean that most mono-spaced fonts don’t
> have nice-looking quotation marks?

They are different from what one sees in "almost all professionally
printed literature".  Moreover, they look different from what Word
inserts as part of its "smart quotes" feature, because its default
fonts are not monospaced.

> Mine (DejaVu Sans Mono) does

No, it doesn't (I'm looking at it).  Its curved quotes look very much
like tilted straight lines.  You want to see curved, compare with
Symbola or Lucida Console.

> Do you mean that most users of Emacs who read their e-mail in a
> mono-spaced font may be confused by their font’s poor rendering of
> real quotation marks?

No, I mean that seeing these quotes in scientific and professional
literature won't help, because they are typeset in a very different
typeface there.