"Maiorana, Jason" wrote on 2002-12-04 17:49 UTC: > 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
Just for the record, SuSE 8.1 has actually fixed this issue in their distribution. The problem is that the ASCII-mnmonics to Unicode translation done inside groff (TeX does the same thing) is nice for normal text, but is inappropropriate whenever verbatin quotations of ASCII streams are given, and command line options are an example of that. One temporary solution might be that man page authors should typeset all ASCII strings that are intended to be used verbatimly by users in a monospaced typewriter font. In that case, gnroff should not interpret these ASCII characters as mnemonics for non-ASCII characters, but should just pass them on transparently. The longterm solution is to remove the ASCII mnemonics from grep entirely, turn man page source files into proper UTF-8 files, to avoid such translation accidents. > (Which is why i HATE them). Hate is usually a symptom of a lack of understanding (on one or the other side) ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
