Hi Carsten,
Carsten Kunze wrote on Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 03:59:41PM +0100:
> is there a way (except \N'45') to output an ASCII dash (0x2d)
> with nroff in an UTF-8 locale (i.e. without -T or with -Tutf8)?
>From font/devascii/R, you see that in -Tascii mode, all of the
following glyph names map to ASCII 0x2d: - \- \(en \(hy \(mi
>From src/libs/libgroff/glyphuni.cpp, you see that in -Tutf8 mode,
no glyph name maps to code point U+002D. There is a comment, though:
// `-' and `hy' denote a HYPHEN, usually a glyph with a smaller width than
// the MINUS sign. Users who are viewing broken man pages that assume
// that `-' denotes a U+002D character can either fix the broken man pages
// or apply the workaround described in the PROBLEMS file.
The PROBLEMS file says:
* The UTF-8 output of grotty has strange characters for the minus, the
hyphen, and the right quote. Why?
The used Unicode characters (U+2212 for the minus sign and U+2010 for
the hyphen) are the correct ones, but many programs can't search them
properly. The same is true for the right quote (U+201D). To map
those characters back to the ASCII characters, insert the following
code snippet into the `troffrc' configuration file:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
. char \- \N'45'
. char - \N'45'
. char ' \N'39'
.\}
> I want to copy command lines from nroff output into a xterm,
> but the shell complains about the '-' which is not 0x2d.
That shouldn't happen in manual pages. Both tmac/an-old.tmac
and tmac/doc.tmac contain:
.\" For UTF-8, map some characters conservatively for the sake
.\" of easy cut and paste.
.
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
. rchar \- - ' `
.
. char \- \N'45'
. char - \N'45'
. char ' \N'39'
. char ` \N'96'
.\}
> E.g. mandoc(1) does output 0x2d for '\-' and even '-' which IMHO
> is better for manpages (to allow copiing text into the shell).
That was originally designed for groff compatibility, and i don't
rue it, the way groff does it indeed seems to make sense.
Yours,
Ingo
