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Re: [Groff] '-' characters in man-pages when viewed in en_GB.UTF-8 local
From: |
Werner LEMBERG |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] '-' characters in man-pages when viewed in en_GB.UTF-8 locale |
Date: |
Wed, 04 Sep 2002 17:14:28 +0200 (CEST) |
> when formatting man-pages in en_GB.UTF-8 locale, groff appears to
> use U+2212 (MINUS SIGN) in the output where "\-" appears in the
> source of the man-page.
Correct. `\-' is the minus sign.
> Is this a bug or a feature?
It is a common misuse of `\-' to indicate a longer `-'. For PS
output, `\-' looks much better than `-'; the optimal solution is to
switch to a monospaced font and using `-', but this looks sub-optimal
in man pages which don't highlight monospaced fonts normally.
> 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. Now less tells me "Pattern
> not found", which is true, '-c' is not there, only '−c' is. But it
> is quite difficult to enter U+2212 when searching in a man-page,
> therefore this behaviour doesn't really appear useful to me.
>
> After all, when calling the program on the commandline, I supply the
> option '-c' and not '−c', therefore I would expect that the
> formatted man-page also shows me '-c'.
I don't know an easy solution for this problem. Maybe something like
this:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
. char \- -
could be added to man.local
Werner