On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 10:57:45PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > On Fri, 15 May 2015 22:15:14 +0200 Jakub Wilk <jw...@debian.org> wrote: > > Yeah, these days even upstream groff renders both - and \- as > > HYPHEN-MINUS. > > However, this doesn't appear true with current groff when rendering to > HTML. "man -H" (or "man -Thtml") passes "-" through as "-", but renders > "\-" as "−", which browsers typically render as U+2122.
I think that's simply a bug in groff and should be reported as such. (To fix it, we could for example adjust \- specifically when rendering man/mdoc output to HTML.) > As far as I can tell, manpages should never use "\-" at all unless they > actually want a mathematical minus sign (or in the one line in the NAME > section between the program name and description, as whatis and apropos > apparently require that). (For manpages that want an em-dash, use the > four-character sequence "\(em".) > > Any time a manpage wants "the dash corresponding to the key '-' on the > keyboard", which includes any text the user would type on the keyboard > using that key such as an --option or command-name, the manpage should > just use "-". That's specifically contrary to upstream's consistent typographical advice over the years, and your suggested advice has its own problems such as inappropriate line-breaks due to hyphenation. I don't mind that we've dropped the lintian check nowadays, but please don't reverse it. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
