Re: [Groff] '-' characters in man-pages when viewed in en_GB.UTF-8 locale

[Werner LEMBERG]

> when formatting man-pages in en_GB.UTF-8 locale, groff appears to
> use U+2212 (MINUS SIGN) in the output where "\-" appears in the
> source of the man-page.

Correct.  `\-' is the minus sign.

> Is this a bug or a feature?

It is a common misuse of `\-' to indicate a longer `-'.  For PS
output, `\-' looks much better than `-'; the optimal solution is to
switch to a monospaced font and using `-', but this looks sub-optimal
in man pages which don't highlight monospaced fonts normally.

> It seems to make searching in man-pages more difficult.  When
> looking what the option '-c' of some program means, I used to enter
> 
>     man program RETURN
>     /-c
> 
> and less would search for the -c option. Now less tells me "Pattern
> not found", which is true, '-c' is not there, only '−c' is.  But it
> is quite difficult to enter U+2212 when searching in a man-page,
> therefore this behaviour doesn't really appear useful to me.
> 
> After all, when calling the program on the commandline, I supply the
> option '-c' and not '−c', therefore I would expect that the
> formatted man-page also shows me '-c'.

I don't know an easy solution for this problem.  Maybe something like
this:

  .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
  .  char \- -

could be added to man.local


    Werner