> > As a side-note, I copy/pasted a command line flag from a RH8.0
> > manpage back into the console, and tried to execute the command.
> > It failed, and gave me usage. The reason, I discovered, is that
> > the manpage was not using a regular ascii '-', but instead one of
> > the HYPEN, or EM_DASH things (Which is why i HATE them).
>
> I discovered that a long time ago and gave up copy'n'pasting from
> man pages. I began to write that those characters should not be
> used in man pages, but then I came up with a couple of argument
> against my own and didn't send a message here. One of them was that
> you can configure the way your 'man' works in man.config. You can
> set NROFF to use '-Tascii -man' and you get 'ASCII approximation' of
> real em_dash, hyphen etc so that you can copy and paste and search
> backwad/forward for command line options. Another was that man page
> is not only for screen viewing but also for print out. When printed
> out, genuine hyphen and em dash look certainly better than their
> ASCII approximation.
A better temporary solution is to add the following to man.local:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
. char \- \N'45'
At least SuSE and Debian are already doing this.
Werner
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
