"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> writes:
> How about this?
> \- Minus sign. \- produces the basic Latin hyphen‐minus
> specifying Unix command‐line options and frequently used in
> file names. “-” is a hyphen in roff; some output devices
> replace it with U+2010 (hyphen) or similar.
Sorry for my original message, which was very poorly worded and probably
incredibly confusing. Let me try to make less of a hash of it. I think
what I'm proposing is something like:
\- Basic Latin hyphenminus (U+002D) or ASCII hyphen. This is the
character used for Unix commandline options and frequently in file
names. It is non-breaking; roff will not wrap lines at this
character. "-" (without the "\") is a true hyphen in roff, which is
a different character; some output devices replace it with U+2010
(hyphen) or similar.
What I was trying to get at but didn't express very well was to include
the specific Unicode code point and to avoid the term "minus sign" because
this character is not a minus sign in typography at all (although it is
used that way in code). A minus sign is U+2212 and looks substantially
different because it is designed to match the appearance of the plus sign.
(For example, the line is often at a different height.) I don't know if
*roff has a way of producing that character apart from providing it as
Unicode.
The above also explicitly says that it's non-breaking (I believe that's
the case, although please tell me if I got that wrong) and is more
(perhaps excessively) explicit about distinguishing it from "-" because of
all the confusion about this.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
