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Postings from September 2000
Andreas J Koenig <andreas.koenig@anima.de> writes:
> So, what is your opinion what the perl docs should do?
> (1) Replace smart backticks with U+0027 or
> (2) Replace smart backticks with U+2018 and smart ticks with U+2019
> (3) ??
I think the best solution for the time being for POD at least is to change
C<> to produce 'text' instead of `text' by default, with an option for no
quotes at all (which some folks want anyway) and an option for the current
quotes, or for "", or for «» or »« for that matter. Something like:
pod2man --quotes=none
pod2man --quotes='""'
pod2man --quotes=\`\'
pod2man --quotes=\`\`\'\'
etc. That way, if you have Unicode, you can always specify Unicode quotes
from the command line (although your troff would have to deal with it if
you use pod2man; pod2text will be able to take advantage of it more
quickly).
> Abigail has opined against (2), but if people will want to do (2) in a
> few years anyway, a better alternative than (1) would be good to have.
> Would you (for example) support the idea that POD could special-case
> U+2018/19 and map them to U+0027?
Sure, that's not a bad idea; it fits into the general category of dealing
with various special characters as they appear raw in the source.
Speaking of things that would be nice to have, I'd love it if someone
would write a patch for Pod::Man that would defer generation of all the
extra cruft needed for the support for accented characters until one is
actually used; that could eliminate most of the rather long preamble in
most converted pages, but would require breaking it up and doing something
creative with it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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