192561 |
21-May-2009 |
des |
When man pages are formatted in UTF-8, .Fl is encoded as U+2212 "MINUS SIGN" instead of U+002D "HYPHEN-MINUS". This is unfortunate for two reasons: 1) this is not the character which is actually used on the command line, and 2) it makes it impossible to search a man page for a specific command-line option.
This patch fixes this, but there are other unresolved issues, such as confusion between -, \- and hy: while the latter is always (and only) used for hyphenation, both - and \- are used for negation and subtraction, and \- is used for command-line options and sometimes also for parenthesis. IMHO, the correct Unicode characters are:
- hyphenation: either U+2010 or U+00AD, most likely the former (the latter is the so-called soft hyphen, used to indicate a point at which a text processor is allowed to hyphenate a word)
- negation and subtraction: U+2212
- parenthesis: in English, U+2214, with spaces suppressed before and after; in some others (such as Norwegian), U+2213 with spaces retained.
- command-line options: U+002D, because that is what is actually used on the command line.
However, fixing this would require extensive modifications to (at least) the doc and man macro sets...
MFC after: 1 week
|