Re: [Groff] ASCII Minus Sign in man Pages.

[Clarke Echols]

When I was responsible for all of the manpages in HP's HP-UX (Unix) 
reference manual
and online, I always *typeset* with Courier bold, and used the simple 
hyphen character
because it was all monospace.

Courier was standard for all literals in SYNTAX, including command name, 
and options
such as -r, -f, etc.  Only variable arguments such as "filename", 
directory name, etc.
were always in italic.  This convention was also used in the 
DESCRIPTION, EXAMPLES,
and other such sections.

If a minus sign appeared in regular text, I always used \(mi.  The 
top-of-page heading
(such as cp(1) for the copy-file page, was always in bold Roman (I used 
New Century
Schoolbook bold).

I used the .C name for macros, as in .CI, .IC, for command lines in the 
SYNOPSIS.  I
rewrote/edited the AT&T Unix macros to accommodate that for names of 
commands, functions,
punctuation in C-language functions, etc.  I NEVER used bold Roman font 
for literals in
such instances.

Clarke

On 04/20/2017 04:37 PM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If a command is called /bin/foo-bar and it processes a file format
> foo-xyzzy, then should their man pages use
>
>      foo\-bar
>      .IR foo\-bar (1)
>      .IR foo\-xyzzy (5)
>
> ...and so on?  That's what I thought, `foo-bar' being a hyphen.
>
> Various things around the place collude so both `\-', or the wrong,
> hyphen, `-', produce U+002D, e.g.
> /usr/share/groff/1.22.3/tmac/an-old.tmac has
>
>      .\" For UTF-8, map some characters conservatively for the sake
>      .\" of easy cut and paste.
>      .
>      .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
>      .  rchar \- - ' `
>      .
>      .  char \- \N'45'
>      .  char  - \N'45'
>      .  char  ' \N'39'
>      .  char  ` \N'96'
>      .\}
>
> But for a man page that's cross platform, non-groff, e.g. AIX, and to be
> seen in a variety of formats, all groff's `-T's at least, how does one
> ensure that U+002D will result so it can be cut and pasted back to the
> shell?  Investigation is hamped by some viewers, e.g. PDF, seeming to
> translate non-U+002D back to U+002D as a "favour".  :-)  Fine, but one
> can't assume the user's PDF viewer will do this.
>
> \N'45' is portable since it's CSTR 54, but it's Nth character of the
> current font.  Does that mean I should use this wherever I want to
> ensure U+002D appears in the output for pasting?

--
Clarke Echols
Copywriter and Marketing Communications Specialist
Loveland, CO
(970) 667-6736

www.ClarkeEchols.com

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