acute accent marks in man page

[Jelmer Vernooij]

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Russ Allbery wrote:
> Package: bzr Version: 1.0-1 Severity: minor
>
> The man page generated by the generate_docs.py tool tries to escape
> apostrophes with \. This doesn't work correctly with a current
> groff. \' is converted to an acute accent mark rather than an
> apostrophe.
>
> With groff, what you want is \(aq. Unfortunately, that's
> groff-specific and won't work with, for example, Solaris man.
>
> Pod::Man adds:
>
> .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq .el .ds Aq '
>
> to the preamble of the man page and then uses \*(Aq as the escape
> for apostrophes in the man page.
  affects bzr
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[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

Newer versions of groff happily support "\'"

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Uh, no they don’t. I have groff 1.21, the latest released version, and there are still acute accent marks in the man page. And I don’t see anything relevant in the post-1.21 CVS ChangeLog.

$ groff --version
GNU groff version 1.21
…
$ man bzr | grep ´
           --dry-run Show what would be done, but don´t
           --no-recurse Don´t recursively add the contents of
       recursively into versioned directories. If no names are given ´.´ is
…

[JC Hulce (soaringsky)]

This bug is marked as being fixed upstream, but not in Ubuntu. However, we don't have any details about the upstream fix. What upstream revision/ version fixed this issue?

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

There is some discussion over whether or not this is fixed.

Both ' and ` display properly in the bzr manpage here on Ubuntu 12.04, and I don't get any errors. If this is still an issue, please let us know where this shows up as a problem and/or how to reproduce it.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

The problem is still present in bzr 2.5.0: the man page still has acute accent marks instead of apostrophes, as you can check for yourself by running
man bzr | grep "´"
man bzr | grep "'"

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

By the way, the same bug was fixed in DocBook here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2412738&group_id=21935&atid=373747
http://docbook.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docbook?view=revision&revision=8841