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

[Mike Fabian]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

>> 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

If I add these two lines to

    /usr/share/groff/site-tmac/tmac.andocdb

I get U+2010 (HYPHEN). How to get U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS)?

-- 
Mike Fabian   <address@hidden>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。