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Re: Text complement font

> >but the single straight code should be in the primary font.
> 
> Is there a good reason for the straight ' and " to be in the primary
> font?  I doubt many hyphenation tables will need it... do they have to
> be in the primary font for ligaturing or kerning reasons?  I agree it
> would be nice if they lived together, but perhaps the text symbol
> encoding is a better home for both of them?
> 
Well, I was hoping that maybe we could correct the bug|feature of CM
typewriter fonts, of having an opening quote instead of th GRAVE ACCENT
(character 60 in ISO-646) and a closing quote instead of the single straight
quote. I know this would change the appearance of TeX verbatim a lot, but
now we can hardly call it `verbatim'. In the ISO 10646 code you have special
codes for opening and closing quotes (codes 2018--201F) and in the DC fonts
there is a very nice initiative of having ASCII-shaped glyphs (ASCII-tilde,
ASCII-circumflex).
My idea was to put an ASCII-grave accent instead of an opening quote and a
straight single quote instead of a closing quote. For non-typewriter fonts
one could have ligatures `+<any letter or digit> = <opening quote>+<..>
and <any letter or digit>+' = <...>+<closing quote>, but these need not subsist
for typewriter fonts (except DCVTT).
No flames please, it.s just an idea.

Yannis