Chet Ramey wrote in <2fd2ed52-3272-3433-6179-164bc5122...@case.edu>: ... |> At 2023-07-26T10:47:05+0200, Thomas ten Cate wrote: |>> In the bash manual page (`man bash`), the ASCII tilde character '~' |>> (0x7e) is replaced by the Unicode character '˜' (U+02DC SMALL TILDE): |>> |>> $ man bash | grep 'additional binary operator' |>> An additional binary operator, =˜, is available, |>> |>> The same happens for the use of ~ as a shorthand for the home |>> directory. This makes the manual page incorrect, and difficult to |>> search. ... |>> I don't know the first thing about groff, but `man groff_char` |>> suggests that ~ is indeed rendered as "modifier tilde", and that one |>> should write \(ti to obtain an actual tilde character.
Because i always have to give some remarks, this design decision of James Clark of groff (~ is for accent) i personally always found terrible. In the past i suggested to at least change the mdoc(7) manual macros so that during arguments for .Pa (path) (and similar, like code blocks etc) a tilde is indeed ASCII tilde, and nothing else. Unfortunately that was not followed. If i grep the manuals in the BSD git repo then they would benefit from that decision; whereas ~ in paths is not often used, (ti is never, unless i have overseen it. \(ti / \[ti] for ASCII tilde in UNIX manuals, code blocks, formulas etc is just sick. And then the world moved to UTF-8 long ago; i personally have never made use of such crux in neither TeX nor roff, if all else fails you can map something for a specific document. Quite honestly, in NetBSD, only mdocml and groff use \(ti/\[ti], In FreeBSD, only (external, new thing) bc(1) / dc(1), as well as nvi and mandoc (mdocml), and less for its command line option. On OpenBSD, mandoc plus origin/master:lib/libc/gen/ispunct.3:.Dl !\(dq#$%&\(aq()*+,\-./:;<=>?@[\e]\(ha_\(ga{|}\(ti origin/master:lib/libcrypto/man/ASN1_BIT_STRING_set.3:.D1 Po Fa bitstr No & Pf \(ti Fa goodbits Pc == 0 Plain tilde is the dead king, long live the king. Thank you, --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)