RE: Single quotes in Info

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> Anyway, we should revive bug #13131, and provide an easier solution
> for this particular issue.

I agree.  For this particular (search) issue.

This is conceptually related to, but it need not necessarily be
extended to, discussion about being able to Isearch abstracting from
diacritical marks etc.  (E.g. bug #13041:
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13041.)

IOW, being able to easily specify equivalence classes of chars for
search (and other) purposes, and preferably being able to quickly
choose whether to make use of them (this one or that one) - e.g.,
as we can do now for case-sensitivity (`a' ~ `A').

The easily-search-for-curly-or-not-curly problem reminds us that
Info is not only about display: One needs to be able to easily
search for (and perhaps even type directly) the chars that are
displayed.  Chars ` and ' correspond to keys on most keyboards.
‘ and ’ do not.

Some of those who propose curly-quote etc. display as a "modernization"
of Emacs might not take sufficiently into account how Emacs users
interact with the text.  "Modern" appearance is nice (even important),
but Emacs is not *only* about display.

> > How to get back to ASCII quotes?
> 
> I think you need to regenerate the Info docs, using the levers we did
> in Emacs 24 to disallow Unicode quotes.  Or customize 'makeinfo' to
> produce ASCII characters instead (search for OPEN_QUOTE_SYMBOL in the
> Texinfo manual), and then regenerate the docs.  Or install an older
> 'makeinfo', which didn't produce these quotes, and then regenerate the
> docs.

As I know you are aware, Eli, this return-to-the-source is not a real
solution.  (Ideally) Emacs users themselves should be able (somehow)
to choose which chars are used for such display.  Remaking Info should
not be our only (i.e., final) answer, even if it is such today.