Re: [Groff] hyphen vs. minus sign

[brian m. carlson]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 11:02:41AM +0200, Gunnar Ritter wrote:
> 
> No, you cannot, since using \- is not an advice that
> has been introduced by you (even though you may have
> advised it). Proper manual pages have used \- since
> Unix 7th edition at least. Moreover, they have often
> used regular or bold font for command line examples.
> 
> I would recommend to map \- to U+002D for all output
> devices that use ASCII codes.

I concur with this advice.  The use of \- is long-established, and as
someone who has written manpages for Debian, I can tell you that bold
and italic fonts are often used for at least the synopsis section (see
e.g. groff(1)).

I will admit that it is difficult to get people to use \- instead of -,
but there's really no alternative.  I'm pretty sure that all other troff
implementations map \- to U+002D (mine does as of the latest commit).

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only
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