Re: Problems with - and ' in some man-pages
On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 12:11:16AM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> ke, 2005-03-02 kello 22:45 +0100, Bernd Eckenfels kirjoitti:
> > In article <[🔎] 20050302204212.GD2652@b-tk.org> you wrote:
> > > Unicode. If people want to use Unicode, this is fine;
> > > Unicode and utf-8 exist to be used, after all. However,
> > > restricted character sets (mainly ascii and Latin-1)
> > > offer several real practical benefits
> >
> > I dont think it is fine to use the wrong character for options. The command
> > option character in the man page must be the same which is used at the
> > command line.
>
> If the manual page source says \- instead of - (as it properly should,
> so that when typeset for hardcopy output) then a proper ASCII minus
> character is printed.
>
> The problem occurs when manual pages use unescaped minuses in the
> input and groff thinks it should output Unicode characters for hyphens.
> For terminal output, I wish it wouldn't.
I had this discussion a few times with groff upstream a while back, and
Werner's attitude was that the Unicode HYPHEN character was
typographically correct and that Unicode HYPHEN-MINUS had little
typographical value. At the time, I was inclined to agree, since groff
*is* a typesetter rather than just an engine for formatting manual
pages. I'm beginning to lean in the opposite direction now, though, as
it's proven to be rather annoying particularly given the lacking support
for Unicode HYPHEN in many fonts (especially on the console).
(Either way, it should still be configurable, and manual pages should
still be fixed.)
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: