I don't necessarily agree with the "1 point smaller" (and I'd use Courier Bold), but otherwise Clarke's suggestion is definitely the best way to go, namely to use macros "C", "CR", CB", "CI", etc. in analogy to the "B" and "I" (and combinations) macros already available in man. Unfortunately, this only works if you know that the target system has these macros available. A more portable solution would be to define the macros in the manpage, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a standard "man" macro package. I would definitely avoid explicitly doing the markup with "\f" escapes, this makes the manpage code far less readable. (Better include the macros, then.)
(As an added bonus, these macros can map hyphen and minus both to minus, making everything appear "ASCII-teletype-like", so you wouldn't have to worry about typing "\-" vs. "-".) If this is not an option, I'd side with Ted, namely to use a format such as "\-\-dump-strings". Using "minus" as option-prefix instead of hyphen is good, because some programs use options prefixed by "plus", and this looks bad if paired with "hyphen" instead of "minus". (I don't think the two minus signs are too close together, but that's obviously a matter of taste. But it would look better in a monospaced font, I'd think.)
