Re: [Groff] ASCII Minus Sign in man Pages.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ingo,

> That leads to a natural suggestion solving *both* of these problems:
>
>  - Make sure *all* output devices (even UTF-8) render - as a
>    typographic hyphen (U+2010 HYPHEN) even in manual pages.
>    That solves the second problem brought up in this mail.
>    Yes, it will require fixing lots of manual pages, but if
>    we decide that way, i think i'm willing to try and convince
>    the BSD camp and help fixing OpenBSD manuals, even though
>    i anticipate that will require some work.  That has good
>    chances to work out because quite a few people are already
>    at least half-aware that the input - is not quite the same
>    as an output ASCII HYPHEN-MINUS.
>
>  - Make sure *all* output devices (even PDF) render \- as
>    U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS.  That is admittedly a deviation from current
>    practice, but it thoroughly solves Ralph's original problem for
>    the future, and i think it is close to what \- was originally
>    intended to mean in historical roff implementations, so i don't
>    view it as trampling on roff traditions.  Also, the visual
>    appearance of U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS and U+2212 MINUS SIGN is so
>    similar in most fonts that this change is unlikely to cause
>    much outrage.
>
>  - Educate people to always use \(mi rather than \- if they want a
>    typographic minus sign U+2212 MINUS SIGN (say, in mathematical
>    formula) as opposed to an ASCII minus sign (say, in sample C code).
>
>  - Nothing changes for \(en and \(em.
>
> After the above code changes in groff, Heirloom, mandoc, and the
> related documentation, and until manual pages adapt, people may
> see slighly wrong typography in practice - but none of that will
> harm understanding.  The same goes for people using legacy roff
> implementations other than the three mentioned, or old versions
> of groff.  So incompatibility costs are minor and the transition
> paths are more or less benign.
>
> Thoughts?

Well done, it seems ideal.

    -     ‐  U+2010 HYPHEN        Long‐term usage.
    \-    -  U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS  wc -l
    \(mi  −  U+2212 MINUS SIGN    Maths −42.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy