Hi, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Tue, May 02, 2017 at 11:50:31AM +0200:
> I now think it is better to revert all those per-macro adjustments > altogether and be pure; if people use \- to get "nicer" (smoother > and finer that is) output then pasting from manual is simply > impossible. That is clearly the worst suggestion so far. It is not just a matter of "if (some) people". Take, for example, mdoc(7). It has been enforcing \- for .Fl since its inception in 4.3BSD-Reno in 1990, and that wasn't a new choice even though man(7) does not enforce rendering of command line options in any particular way, but leaves the choice to the author; but standard practice, in man(7) as well, has been to use \- for command line options since the first release of man(7) in Version 7 AT&T UNIX in 1979. And that made sense at the time because the minus sign was ASCII 0x2d in nroff(1), you couldn't cut and paste from a manual printed on paper, and the distinction between Unicode U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS and U+2212 MINUS SIGN did not yet exist. So you propose that we break copy and paste from more or less all manual pages now (including in -Tutf8 output which is the default on terminals in many systems at this point), even though it has been working just fine for almost 40 years? You must be jesting. No, making the decision at this point in time that \- has to consistently render as U+2212 MINUS SIGN is not an option at all. That's one half of the reason why i suggested to make it render consistently as U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. > Distributions like Debian can then still easily apply > remappings at well-known places and document it in their > guidelines. So groff should do something that is unusable and ask downstream distributions to fix it up to make it useable? That guarantees utter confusion and doesn't make any sense whatsoever. What are other formatters (like mandoc) supposed to do? Mandoc doesn't even have the distinction of "upstream" and "distribution" to implement such a split in behavior. Both FreeBSD and OpenBSD use the mandoc code directly from the HEAD of the VCS. By the way, in the meantime, i also received support from NetBSD/pkgsrc for my proposal (\- always U+002D, \(mi always U+2212). That's Ralph, Branden, NetBSD/pkgsrc, and one relevant FreeBSD developer then, and no protest so far from OpenBSD. I think i'll start preparing patches and submit them to the groff bugtracker when they are ready. Yours, Ingo
