Define strings for directional single quotation marks.
groff_man_style(7):
Notes
Some tips on composing and troubleshooting your man pages follow.
...
• When and how should I use quotation marks?
...
Obtaining directional single quotation marks is more of a
challenge. Historically, man pages used ` and ', which troff
rendered on typesetters as ‘ and ’, exclusively for them.
However, in recent years, some distributors of groff have chosen
to override the meanings of these characters in man pages,
remapping them to their Unicode Basic Latin code points.
Unfortunately, ` and ' are the only reliable means of obtaining
directional single quotation marks in AT&T troff; in that
implementation, often no special character escape sequences exist
to obtain them. Further, AT&T troff’s special character
identifiers, like its font names, were device‐specific. To
achieve quotation portably in man pages rendered both by AT&T and
more modern troffs, consider adding a preamble to your page after
the TH call as follows.
.ie \n(.g \{\
. ds oq \[oq]\"
. ds cq \[cq]\"
.\}
.el \{\
. ds oq `\"
. ds cq '\"
.\}
You must then use the \* escape sequence to interpolate the
quotation mark strings.
The command
.RB \*(oq "while !\& git pull; do sleep 10; done" \*(cq
retries an update from the repository until it succeeds.
If this procedure seems complex, petition your distributor to
revert their remapping of the ` and ' characters.
G. Branden Robinson
4a76d66ad9