[Groff] Minus sign in groff

[Zvi Har'El]

Hello list members,

I am using ‘groff -Tutf8 -man’ to produce my manual pages, and since I am
using a UTF-8 locale this is very convenient for me. But, one thing is
annoying: Searching for options never works! As a matter of fact, I noticed
that the ASCII minus sign is never used by the UTF-8 groff output:
groff_char(7) claims that 

    the  ISO  Latin‐1  ‘Hyphen,  Minus  Sign’  (code 45) prints as a hyphen; a
    minus sign can be obtained with ‘\‐’.

and this is fine. However, the minus sign generated is the Unicode U+2212.
I didn't find any way to produce the ASCII minus sign, U+002D. On the other
hand, there is yet another method to generate the same U+2212 minus, using the
\(mi. Is this the way it is intended, or a bug/oversight in the UTF-8
post-processor? The solution I currently found is defining certain
‘VT100.Translations’ for my X-terminal so it will recognize a control-minus as
a U+2010, HYPHEN, and meta-minus as a U+2212, MINUS SIGN, and I can search for
them in the manual pages (the latter should suffice, but many man-pages
writers forget to escape their minus signs ;-)).

Best,

Zvi.

-- 
Dr. Zvi Har'El     mailto:address@hidden     Department of Mathematics
tel:+972-54-227607 icq:179294841     Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
fax:+972-4-8293388 http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/     Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
"If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all." -- Thumper (1942)
                          Wednesday, 29 Kislev 5764, 24 December 2003, 11:05AM