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Text complement font

>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'. 
 
The problem is that ISO-646 bears very little resembelence to ASCII fonts 
in practice, where some have quotes as ` and ', some have open quote as ` 
and straight quote as ', some have grave as ` and straight quote as ', 
some have grave as ` and acute as ', and most have a mix-and-match 
combination of glyphs which are meant to pass muster as all of these!
 
>one could have ligatures `+<any letter or digit> = <opening quote>+<..>
>and <any letter or digit>+' = <...>+<closing quote>
 
I'd actually suggest we go the other way around, that ` and ' normally 
produce open and close quotes (since this is what they're used for in 
almost all TeX fonts) and that a verbatim mode which wants an ascii grave 
and straight quote should make ` and ' active.  The same argument can be 
used for ".
 
I agree that ASCII grave, single and double straight quotes are useful 
glyphs, but I think that they're not often used with most fonts, and don't 
require kerning and ligaturing, so they can be moved to a text symbol 
encoding.
 
Alan.