On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 03:20:58PM +0000, Jacob Nevins wrote: > rjk writes: > > Subject: 'man pterm' uses unicode dashes for option markers, in unicode > > locale > [...] > > OPTIONS$ > > The command-line options supported by pterm are:$ > > $ > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]@M-^Pe command [ arguments ]$ > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > and Colin replies: > > I think this is a halibut bug; it turns \- (non-breaking hyphen) into > > \(hy. I suspect that in practice \- would be more appropriate for manual > > page output. > > I think this is fixed in upstream halibut[*] as of r8309. We're emitting > "-" rather than the "\-" you suggest; a little experimentation suggests > that we're doing the Right Thing, as the former tends to come out as > "U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS" (what we want) whereas the latter has minus-sign > semantics and tends to come out as "U+2212 MINUS SIGN".
Unfortunately, groff doesn't have anything that reliably comes out as U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS everywhere. On Debian both "-" and "\-" are hacked to come out as U+002D, but strictly speaking "-" has hyphen semantics and "\-" has minus-sign semantics. Upstream disapproves of HYPHEN-MINUS as being typographically unsound, which doesn't help manual pages very much. Given a choice between the two, at least "\-" doesn't break lines, so I think it's the better choice. You could behave differently in nroff and troff mode if you felt that worked better. > rjk also writes: > > Also it uses curly quotes instead of the ascii apostrophe sign in the > > pterm -e example. > > This isn't yet fixed upstream. The options appear to be: > ' Current; "right quote" semantics so tends to generate > U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK > \' "Acute accent" semantics so tends to generate > U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT > \(aq "Apostrophe quote"; appears to generate what we want, > U+0027 APOSTROPHE > > I'm going to go for generating the latter, but I'm slightly nervous > because that named character is not in the "classical" troff reference, > <http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/cstr54.ps>, so I'm worried about its > portability. Opinions? I suggest following pod2man's lead and putting this in a preamble: .ie !\n(.g .ds Aq \(aq .el .ds aq ' Then you can use "\*(Aq". (I think pod2man does more or less what I suggest above for non-breaking hyphens, too.) > (There's also an equivalent issue with backticks; \` appears to be the > way to go here. Reading troff documentation suggests that these are > likely to be the only problematic characters.) I agree on both counts. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
