Re: [Groff] Draft paper: "Writing Effective Manual Pages"

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

I don't necessarily agree with the "1 point smaller" (and I'd use
Courier Bold), but otherwise Clarke's suggestion is definitely
the best way to go, namely to use macros "C", "CR", CB", "CI",
etc. in analogy to the "B" and "I" (and combinations) macros
already available in man.  Unfortunately, this only works if you
know that the target system has these macros available.  A more
portable solution would be to define the macros in the manpage,
but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a standard "man"
macro package.  I would definitely avoid explicitly doing the markup
with "\f" escapes, this makes the manpage code far less readable.
(Better include the macros, then.)

(As an added bonus, these macros can map hyphen and minus both
to minus, making everything appear "ASCII-teletype-like", so you
wouldn't have to worry about typing "\-" vs. "-".)

If this is not an option, I'd side with Ted, namely to use a
format such as "\-\-dump-strings".  Using "minus" as option-prefix
instead of hyphen is good, because some programs use options
prefixed by "plus", and this looks bad if paired with "hyphen"
instead of "minus".  (I don't think the two minus signs are
too close together, but that's obviously a matter of taste.
But it would look better in a monospaced font, I'd think.)