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


From: G. Branden Robinson
Subject: Re: [Groff] ASCII Minus Sign in man Pages.
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 03:29:09 -0400
User-agent: NeoMutt/20170113 (1.7.2)

At 2017-04-23T12:10:03-0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Interesting difference in habits. I never look at groff-ed man pages
> on line--only the default nroff, which is fine for pasting, and more
> importantly, examinable with a full-featured editor.

A lot of (GNU/)Linux systems these days are configured with
UTF-8-capable terminal emulators by default, so grotty emits UTF-8
characters.  Even 15-20 years ago, on my Debian systems at least, I was
getting ISO 8859-1 to my consoles and xterms, and those damned hyphens
would show up if the source was wrong.

So the former advantage was lost with the march of post-ASCII progress,
but the latter remains.  In fact, with a font with good glyph coverage
like FreeFont (Mono)[1], every glyph save two in groff_char(7) renders,
and bold and italics look nice.

> And I don't see how a typist can foresee what I am going to paste text
> into any better than AI can.  After all, I write man pages and other
> documents *about* programs in volume comparable to programs
> themselves.

There have been a few attempts at "manlint" programs over the years but
all seem to have died away.  Perhaps the fate of "lint" itself points to
the correct solution; maybe we should be adding coaching diagnostics
into groff (and its macro packages) itself, where they can be enabled
with a flag.

The triple-overloading of codepoint 45 in ASCII as hyphen-minus-dash
sure did impose a technical debt.  :(

Regards,
Branden

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