Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> writes: > I was left not actually know what - and \- represent, nor which one I > _should_ be using in my man pages. And that seems to be the one thing we > should be telling the 'average maintainer'.
- turns into a real hyphen (, U+2010). \- turns into the ASCII hyphen-minus that we use for options, programming, and so forth (U+002D). I think my position at this point as pod2man maintainer (not yet implemented in podlators) is that every occurrence of - in POD source will be translated into \-, rather than using the current heuristics, and people who meant to use ‐ should type it directly in the POD source. pod2man now supports Unicode fairly well and will pass that along to *roff, which presumably will do the right thing with it after character set translation. Currently, pod2man uses an extensive set of heuristics, but I think this is a lost cause. I cannot think of any heuristic that will understand that the - in apt-get should be U+002D (so that one can search for the command as it is typed), but the - in apt-like should be aptlike, since this is an English hyphenated expression talking about programs that are similar to apt. This is simply not information that POD has available to it unless the user writing the document uses Unicode hyphens. I believe the primary formatting degredation will be for very long hyphenated phrases like super-long-adjectival-phrase-intended-as-a-joke, because *roff will now not break on those hyphens that have been turned into \-. People will have to rewrite them using proper Unicode hyphens to get proper formatting. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
