Bruno Haible wrote on 2002-12-05 15:21 UTC:
> It's better to fix the man pages instead. The groff input language has
> the distinction between - and \- for ages. In some cases (not in
> command line options!) HYPHENs look better than MINUS signs, therefore
> I want to be able to write man pages where - gives a HYPHEN.
When I write a man page, how shall I best tell *roff in a simple and
portable way (i.e., not only for the GNU version) to
- represent a string in any plaintext output encoding as
a verbatim ASCII quote of what is found in the source file,
that is not be mangled into any other characters because
people might want to cut&paste it from a UTF-8 xterm
or xman into xterm
- switch to a monospaced typewriter font in Postscript output
to signal the reader of the printed document that this is meant to
be verbatim ASCII syntax (preferably using the correct glyphs for
APOSTROPHE and GRAVE ACCENT)
The problem is not restricted to hyphen and minus. There are also the
directional quotation marks to consider, which appear in code samples
given on many man pages (e.g., perl, bash, etc.).
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
