Re: GNU man and "hyphen minus"

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 04:55:42PM +0300, Олег Самойлов wrote:
> Subject: GNU man and "hyphen minus"

For the record, there's no such thing as GNU man; man-db is hosted on
GNU infrastructure, but it's not a GNU project so uses a "nongnu.org"
domain.

> Wiith this man I have the next problem. All symbols "hyphen minus" are
> converted to: hyphen, minus, dashes, etc. And this lead to two
> troubles: search for commands with "hyphen minus" don't work and
> copy/paste from the man page such commands useless (because it has
> hyphen instead of "hyphen minus"). This is with utf-8 locale, for
> instance en_US,UTF-8.

This is the result of using groff's utf8 device, rather than something
man-db is intentionally doing itself.  Debian's groff package installs
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/groff/blob/master/debian/mandoc.local in
/etc/groff/man.local and /etc/groff/mdoc.local, which (among other
things) maps \- to U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS to work around poor typography in
many man pages.  Perhaps you could see if the Homebrew groff maintainers
would be willing to apply a similar customisation?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [address@hidden]