Re: [Groff] hyphen vs. minus sign

[Bruno Haible]

Werner,

> > Input:
> >                       \-              -
> >                    MINUS SIGN       HYPHEN
> > 
> > Output with the current groff CVS:
> > 
> > groff -Tutf8        U+2212          U+002D
> >                    MINUS SIGN     HYPHEN-MINUS
> 
> This is fixed now; it will again create HYPHEN instead of HYPHEN-MINUS
> (and this can be overridden on demand as documented).  The solution
> was quite simple: For the UTF-8 device, I now say
> 
>   .char - \[hy]

Thanks, that works fine.

> As far as I can see, this is the only character in the range
> 0x00-0x7F which has to be handled specially, right?

The groff_char.7 documentation also lists the backquote u0040 and the
apostrophe u0027. Adding this to unicode.tmac fixes these:

.char ` \[oq]
.char ' \[cq]

> > groff -Thtml        U+2212          U+002D
> >                    MINUS SIGN     HYPHEN-MINUS
> 
> This stays as-is.

OK for the hyphen: A U+002D in a proportional HTML font looks closely enough
like a hyphen.

But ` and ' in HTML are not OK: They yield ` and ', respectively, not
‘ and ’ as they should.

How to fix this? IIRC, in the C++ code, the font handling for the html and
utf8 devices is the same. Therefore I tried to add to html.tmac:
.mso unicode.tmac
and this fixes it!


One problem is still left: What is now the recommended way to write a
shell command line, in a way that is copy&pastable from at least the utf8
and html outputs?
- If I write     "foo --help"     in the utf8 output we get twice u2010.
- If I write     "foo \-\-help"   in the utf8 output we get twice u2212.
- If I write     "foo \[u002D]\[u002D]help"    then in the utf8 output
  we get twice u002D, as desired, but in the html processing I get
  "warning: can't find special character `u002D'". Hmm??

It took me already some effort to convince the Linux manpages maintainer
that \- should be used for copy&pastable commands in manpages. Do I have
to recommend him to use \[u002D] now instead?

Bruno