[bug #50917] Make \- consistently render as U+002D across all macro sets and devices

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #50917 (project groff):

Hello Bruno - wrt comment #4:

I do not accept \(pl and \(mi.  Using them in manual pages is strongly
discouraged, and no manual page author is expected to have heard about them. 
They are intended for specialized mathematical typesetting, and in that
context, they are not ugly: many mathematical symbols require roff escape
sequences.  But in manual pages, asking people to learn about arcane and ugly
stuff like \(pl, \(mi, and the hypothetical \(hm would be unacceptable.
It is already bad enough that manual page authors have to consider the
differences among "-" (hyphen), "\-" (hyphen-minus and minus), and "\(en"
(dash) - but at least here the concept is well-known from classical
typography.  Adding yet another escape sequence \(hm that does not even exist
in classical typography is not going to fly.  Besides, i'm not volunteering to
edit the many thousand existing manual pages to introduce it (which requires
manual work), and i assume you aren't either.

Regarding -Thtml, it may well be a bug that \- renders as minus rather than as
hyphen-minus.  It doesn't seem unlikely to me that it can be changed, using a
similar approach as in the terminal formatters for -man and -mdoc.  All i'm
saying is that i don't deem -Thtml worthy of wasting time on, not even to
investigate a minor potential bug, and that _this ticket_ is unrelated to HTML
in any case.

If you want to file a bug report saying "-man -Thtml and -mdoc -Thtml render
\- as minus but should render it as hyphen-minus just like -Tutf8", maybe
another developer deems it worthy of investigation.  Though frankly, i
consider -Thtml unmaintained for almost a decade.  The last bugfix commit in
src/devices/devhtml was by wl@ on Feb 25 19:34:08 2010.

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