Robert Elz writes: > The issue which is not so clear is whether the '-' that introduces options > on unix commands, and is used various other places (like scan last:-10) > is really intended to be a hyphen, a minus, or some other kind of dash. > > The one on the scan example given is most likely a minus, but in "ls -l" > (or "scan -width") it might really be an "n dash" that is intended (a > minus would appear a little too high to look good.) > > This isn't helped by the fact that some people read out "ls -l" as > "ell ess dash ell" and others as "ell ess minus ell" (I don't recall > ever hearing "ell ess hyphen ell" but someone has probably said that.) > > No-one has ever been too concerned about this, as when we type (in ascii) > there is but one character to use for all purposes (other than that sometimes > we use it twice to simulate an "m dash",) but when typesetting, it makes > a difference.
It is also a problem when copy/paste gets involved (as often happens in manpages). The historical convention has been to use \- for flags. This gets transformed into an actual minus (Unicode U+2212) in some typeset outputs, like Postscript and PDF and even HTML, but this varies widely across troff implementations, to say the least. Of course back in the 1970s nobody imagined using a mouse to select typeset text and paste it into a terminal. The historical decisions from back then thus negatively affect the modern, rich-fonted, Unicode-oriented world. Personally I like the route taken by troff's -mdoc macros: flags are prefixed with ASCII '-' (so copy/paste works in all output formats), but the flags are typeset in a fixed-width font and as a result the '-' doesn't look unnaturally small. > I have no idea if there is an established convention used by the unix > book publishing industry. At least all of Kernighan's books (such as UPE) use \- for command-line flags. -- Anthony J. Bentley _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
