Re: [Groff] '-' characters in man-pages when viewed in en_GB.UTF-8 locale

[Bruno Haible]

Werner LEMBERG writes:
> Correct.  `\-' is the minus sign.
> 
> > Is this a bug or a feature?

It's a feature. You don't know what a U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS) looks
like in the tty font. We map \- to MINUS SIGN because we know this is
usually long enough.

> > It seems to make searching in man-pages more difficult.  When
> > looking what the option '-c' of some program means, I used to enter
> > 
> >     man program RETURN
> >     /-c
> > 
> > and less would search for the -c option.

In Unicode there are variants not only of dashes, but also of spaces,
even of Latin letters.

The authors of text editors and viewers are dealing with the problem
by providing case-insensitive search primitives (emacs and vi, at
least). When dealing with a Unicode encoded text, they should - in the
case insensitive mode - IMO also ignore differences between dashes and
differences between variants of spaces.

> > Now less tells me "Pattern not found"

The answer are Unicode aware search routines.

Bruno