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

[Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 8:36 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 5:43 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> >> 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.

That’s a matter of opinion.  While it doesn’t curve like, for example,
Computer Modern Roman or, as you point out, Symbola or Lucida Console,
they hardly look like tilted straight lines.  See Tahoma for such a
rendition.  Either way, I don’t agree at all with the point your
trying to make.  The letter ‘a’ can, for example, be rendered in two
very different ways and we still manage to read it as the same letter.

> You want to see curved, compare with
> Symbola or Lucida Console.

So if a user happens to use these fonts they’ll be fine?

>> 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.

So they’re expected to be able to read but not be able to see past the
minute differences between two symbols (which are their own mirror
images, so really only one) in two different typefaces?