> 1) Should deroff -w interpret curly quotes (“”)? Right now it doesn't,
> so spell is treating any words with either character as spelling errors.

; 9diff deroff.c
/n/sources/plan9//sys/src/cmd/deroff.c:963,968 - deroff.c:963,970
return chars[c];
switch(c){
case 0x2013: case 0x2014: /* en dash, em dash */
+ case L'“':
+ case L'”':
return SPECIAL;
}
return EXTENDED;

- erik

It might also be worth pointing out that troff does just fine with `` and ''
as curly quotes, so there's not a lot of need to use the Unicode ones.
In fact, in the default fonts I find that the Unicode ones don't typeset
particularly well -- they are too compressed.

So a more complete solution is just not to use them.

Russ

> It might also be worth pointing out that troff does just fine with `` and ''
> as curly quotes, so there's not a lot of need to use the Unicode ones.
> In fact, in the default fonts I find that the Unicode ones don't typeset
> particularly well -- they are too compressed.
>
> So a more complete solution is just not to use them.

however, that's not a solution for documents which have used them.

and in theory, “ and ” have been specially crafted by the font designer,
taking into consideration all those fine details that require fonts to
be hand-crafted and not built by computers. (knuth's cmrm font has
” at 042 and “ at 0134, the texbook, appendix f, p. 427.)

wouldn't the best fix for poorly designed fonts be ... a better font?
at least in theory.

- erik