> > I have been convinced that soft hyphen is a control character and > not something visual,
Almost correct. Soft hyphens *do* describe potential breaking points, but they only become visible when surrounding text is broken. For instance, assume this line had soft-hyphens every 20 characters: Methionylalanylthreonylserylarginylglycylalanylserylarginylcysteinylproly When wrapped, this is how it would look: Methionylalanylthre- onylserylarginylgly- cylalanylserylargin- ylcysteinylproly Without soft-hyphens (and when wrapped to 20 columns), it'd look like this instead: Methionylalanylthre onylserylarginylgly cylalanylserylargin ylcysteinylproly Here, hyphenation becomes a lot less apparent. I should also add that I don't know how well-supported this behaviour is between different platforms. I remember reading that some browsers displayed the hyphen between broken word boundaries, while others didn't. Web authors were encouraged to use the more semantic and reliable <wbr/> element <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/wbr> instead. On 30 May 2016 at 22:29, Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso <stef...@sdaoden.eu> wrote: > Stephen Berman <stephen.ber...@gmx.net> wrote: > |Does groff permit characters besides hyphen-minus (ASCII 45) and soft > |hyphen (octal 255) for displaying hyphenation in man pages? I'm asking > > I have been convinced that soft hyphen is a control character and > not something visual, it should be used as a «break-indicator» > rather than as a hyphenation character, interpretation of which is > left as an excercise for the processing software. I have no idea > still but would guess groff uses "hyphen minus" U+002D or hyphen > U+2010 if Unicode is possible. > > |because the Emacs package man.el displays references to other man pages > |(e.g. in the SEE ALSO section) as clickable links, but has a bug when > |such a reference is hyphenated, and in trying to fix this bug the above > |question arose (see > |http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2016-05/msg01358.html). > |I'd be grateful for a definitive answer or at least a pointer to > |relevant documentation. > > Sorry. Truly. > > --steffen > >
