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

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2017-04-24T13:08:17+0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Branden,
> 
> > I certainly believe that is the intent of the an and doc macro package
> > authors.
> ...
> > /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/an-old.tmac:681:.  char \- \N'45'
> > /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/an-old.tmac:682:.  char  - \N'45'
> 
> Yes, but they nobble `-' too, so I could just write a sloppy man page
> with `-', never using `\-', and it would paste from the terminal.

Yeah--that's a sop to the sloppy, perhaps an ill-advised one.

Debian's groff packages have the following in /etc/groff/man.local:

.  \" Debian: Strictly, "-" is a hyphen while "\-" is a minus sign, and the
.  \" former may not always be rendered in the form expected for things like
.  \" command-line options.  Uncomment this if you want to make sure that
.  \" manual pages you're writing are clear of this problem.
.  \" UNCOMMENTED: branden, 2017-04-08
.  if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
.    char - \[hy]

> But there's other -T in groff,

Right--even groff's macro packages only offer this sop on the UTF-8
device.

> and other troffs than groff too, with their
> own -man.

True, but even Heirloom troff goes to considerable effort to be groff-
compatible.

What would you like to see?

Regards,
Branden