docs/78240: Replace <literal> with <quote> around a #

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:21:24AM +0100, Marc Fonvieille wrote:
> 
> > Yep.  I mean, we use literal everywhere else.  There shouldn't
> > really be a reason to quote the specific character.
> > 
> > In all honesty, I guess it depends on how you look at it.
> > 
> 
> In fact I was wondering about a typographic rule, I was wondering if
> people used to put quotes cause they could not "emphasize" the character
> via any rendering.
> I just looked at a (french) typographic book, it seems (nothing is
> stated) they use quotes for a single character, on another typographic
> book no quotes...  I will reread them on tomorrow morning.
>

Ok, here's the usage I found in the French "Imprimerie Nationale" rules
("Lexique des règles typographiques" ISBN 2-7433-0482-0):

- most of time use of italic for a character
- sometimes use of quotes (in fact for more than 1 character)

I looked for American typography usage but on Internet it's not easy to
find reliable information.  If someone owns the book "The Elements of
Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst (ISBN: 0881791326)...

In fact it's often obvious that on a printed version using a specific
rendering (italic, tt, etc.) is better for the reader, on an online
version this may be different.
I wanted to see what do O'Reilly, so I looked at at "DNS and BIND" (4th
Ed.) expecting to find an answer, but I was disappointed they were not
really consistent.  Most of time they use italic (for a word or a term
it's always italic).  For a single character they use both italic and
quotes, in fact it seems they use quotes when the italic version of the
character does not exist or is "ugly"?  For example they used ``@'' and
<italic>&</italic> (but also <italic>*</italic>).

Well to sum up, I did not find a good answer.

Marc