Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-16 Thread Colin Watson
My plan, as indicated in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1041731#62, had been to leave things much as they are for most of the period while trixie is in development, and then put the ".char - \-" etc. workarounds back in place for nroff output for trixie's release; this would

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Trent W. Buck
On Sun 15 Oct 2023 17:33:07 +0200, Iustin Pop wrote: > At least you're not lazy. I am, so what I did many times is add a > build-depends on pandoc, and write the man page in rst or md. I think > that's a worse solution (pandoc is really heavy), but at least, I don't > have to go back to *roff.

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Russ Allbery
"G. Branden Robinson" 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

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread G. Branden Robinson
Hi Russ, At 2023-10-15T12:06:14-0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Minor point, but since you posted it No worries! > "G. Branden Robinson" writes: > > > ... > > > \- Minus sign or basic Latin hyphen‐minus. \- produces the > > Unix command‐line option dash in the output.

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread G. Branden Robinson
At 2023-10-15T10:01:20-0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Russ Allbery
Minor point, but since you posted it "G. Branden Robinson" writes: > ... > \- Minus sign or basic Latin hyphen‐minus. \- produces the > Unix command‐line option dash in the output. “-” is a > hyphen in the roff language; some output devices replace it >

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread G. Branden Robinson
Hi Wookey, At 2023-10-15T16:08:32+0100, Wookey wrote: > OK. So I read all that, and learned a whole load of stuff I was quite > happy not knowing about. > > However despite reading it all, and especially this bit: > > Whenever I've maintained man pages in roff I tend to be precise in > > the

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Russ Allbery
Wookey 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

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Andreas Metzler
On 2023-10-15 Wookey wrote: [...] > OK. So I read all that, and learned a whole load of stuff I was quite > happy not knowing about. > However despite reading it all, and especially this bit: > "Whenever I've maintained man pages in roff I tend to be precise in > > the usage of - and \-, but TBH

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Iustin Pop
On 2023-10-15 16:08:32, Wookey wrote: > I think you can consider me representative of the typical maintainer > who's intereaction with *roff languages almost entirely takes the > form: 'Oh bloody hell I really ought to write a man page for this > because upstream is too youthful to have done so -

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread Wookey
On 2023-10-15 01:30 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2023-10-14T20:51:27-0600, Antonio Russo wrote: > > Quick background: in the context of Unix usage as documented by > nroff/troff, the dash used at the shell prompt, in text editors, and in > programming language source code is a "minus

Bug#1041731: Hyphens in man pages

2023-10-15 Thread G. Branden Robinson
At 2023-10-14T20:51:27-0600, Antonio Russo wrote: > I discovered a new pet peeve today: if you search for a command in a > manual page, say -e in man 1 zgrep, it's a crapshot whether just > searching for '-e' will find the command or not. The reason is that > "-" may been accidentally encoded as