[texhax] Latin modern typewriter font and single quotes

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Jan 5 22:42:52 CET 2008


Pierre MacKay writes:
 > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > 
 > >There are several variants of "Courier" available.  But see:
 > >
 > >  http://ms25.ath.cx/courier.pdf
 > >
 > >URW Courier (red) is compared with IBM Courier donated to X11 (blue).
 > >This looks like a joke but it's real life.
 > >
 > >Regards,
 > >  Reinhard
 > >
 > Shouldn't lquote and rquote be something different from the straight-up 
 > single "quote"?

Hi Pierre,
in program code the straght-up single quote is fine for the ASCII
character 27(hex) because it is used in a similar way as the
straight-up double quote ASCII 22(hex), for example

echo '$var'  or print 'x'

However, the left quote should be clearly different.  For instance

echo `cat /etc/HOSTNAME`

I would agree with rquote to be different from the straight-up single
quote if there were many situations where quotations are done like
`this' but this is very uncommon in program code.  Of course, I speak
about typewriter fonts only and I assume that they are used for
typesetting program code only.

James, according to the PostScript reference, there are the following
characters.

27 /quoteright
60 /quoteleft
b4 /acute
-- /quotesingle
89 /grave

However, Adobe puts /quoteleft into slot 60 while ISO specifies /grave.
/quotesingle exists in Adobe StandardEncoding but not in ISO-8859-1.

I don't know whether everything needed is in the LM fonts, but I think
it is.  Then it should be possible to make a customized copy of the
encoding vector where /quoteleft is replaced by /grave and /quoteright
by /quotesingle.   

Though I'm very interested in these things as well I don't have much
time at the moment for own experiments.  What I still don't know is
whether /grave is useful.  Designed as an accent rather than as a quote
it might be too small.  But you could try, at least.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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