A recent LWN.net article <https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/> (paywalled
for a while) pointed at https://bugs.debian.org/1041731 and the topic of
"-" vs "\-".
Given the following input:
-\-\[u002D]\[u2013]\[u2014]+\[u2212]
Feeding it through `groff -Tutf8`, I get
‐−-–—+−
<U+2010><U+2212><U+002D><U+2013><U+002B><U+2014>
groff_char(7) says \- maps to "minus sign/Unix dash". Ambiguous, but
ok, it is what it is. Is there a better way though than to explicitly
use \[u002D] to get a guaranteed U+002D?
Second, I turn to PostScript output that is generated by
`groff -Tps`. One observes:
troff:<standard input>:1: warning: special character 'u002D' not defined
(Converting the PS to PDF and opening that with evince), the rendered
view shows a hyphen, a minus, an endash, an emdash, and another minus
but rendered in a different vertical position which does not line up
with the '+' sign.
Third, when one copy-pastes the string shown in evince, I get back:
-−–—+−
<U+002D><U+2212><U+2013><U+2014><U+002B><U+2212>
I expected to receive:
<U+2010><U+002D><U+2013><U+2014><U+002B><U+2212>
so that copypasting commands from PS/PDF would work "right"
similarly as it does for manpages when they use \-.
