Hi Ingo,
> That leads to a natural suggestion solving *both* of these problems:
>
> - Make sure *all* output devices (even UTF-8) render - as a
> typographic hyphen (U+2010 HYPHEN) even in manual pages.
> That solves the second problem brought up in this mail.
> Yes, it will require fixing lots of manual pages, but if
> we decide that way, i think i'm willing to try and convince
> the BSD camp and help fixing OpenBSD manuals, even though
> i anticipate that will require some work. That has good
> chances to work out because quite a few people are already
> at least half-aware that the input - is not quite the same
> as an output ASCII HYPHEN-MINUS.
>
> - Make sure *all* output devices (even PDF) render \- as
> U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. That is admittedly a deviation from current
> practice, but it thoroughly solves Ralph's original problem for
> the future, and i think it is close to what \- was originally
> intended to mean in historical roff implementations, so i don't
> view it as trampling on roff traditions. Also, the visual
> appearance of U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS and U+2212 MINUS SIGN is so
> similar in most fonts that this change is unlikely to cause
> much outrage.
>
> - Educate people to always use \(mi rather than \- if they want a
> typographic minus sign U+2212 MINUS SIGN (say, in mathematical
> formula) as opposed to an ASCII minus sign (say, in sample C code).
>
> - Nothing changes for \(en and \(em.
>
> After the above code changes in groff, Heirloom, mandoc, and the
> related documentation, and until manual pages adapt, people may
> see slighly wrong typography in practice - but none of that will
> harm understanding. The same goes for people using legacy roff
> implementations other than the three mentioned, or old versions
> of groff. So incompatibility costs are minor and the transition
> paths are more or less benign.
>
> Thoughts?
Well done, it seems ideal.
- ‐ U+2010 HYPHEN Long‐term usage.
\- - U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS wc -l
\(mi − U+2212 MINUS SIGN Maths −42.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
