On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Maiorana, Jason wrote:
> As a side-note, I copy/pasted a command line flag from a RH8.0 > manpage back into the console, and tried to execute the command. > It failed, and gave me usage. The reason, I discovered, is that > the manpage was not using a regular ascii '-', but instead one > of the HYPEN, or EM_DASH things (Which is why i HATE them). I discovered that a long time ago and gave up copy'n'pasting from man pages. I began to write that those characters should not be used in man pages, but then I came up with a couple of argument against my own and didn't send a message here. One of them was that you can configure the way your 'man' works in man.config. You can set NROFF to use '-Tascii -man' and you get 'ASCII approximation' of real em_dash, hyphen etc so that you can copy and paste and search backwad/forward for command line options. Another was that man page is not only for screen viewing but also for print out. When printed out, genuine hyphen and em dash look certainly better than their ASCII approximation. Jungshik -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
