Hi Ken,
Also ... why, exactly, do we use \- instead of -?
Because \- is a true minus sign in the current font whereas - is a
hyphen.
$ printf '1-2\n.br\n1\-2\n' | nroff | grep .
1‐2 1−2
$
Ah, I see ... you get "-" producing U+2010 where \- makes U+2212. I
see that's what happens on my MacOS X system as well. Thanks!
Right. Of course, one likes to paste fragments of man page examples to
the command line and expect them to work, and argv[] processing tends to
prefer plain ol' - rather than either of those two you gave. Colin
Watson, all-round good egg and Debian's man(1) maintainer, has
/etc/groff/man.local set up to turn \- into - if outputting to a utf8
terminal.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2003-12/msg00102.html
That file does a few more things these days.
So use \- in the man page where you really mean the key next to 0 and it
should come out as usable on a terminal but still looking nice in a PDF.
(Proof-reading of man pages should always vet the Postscript/PDF
version.)
Cheers, Ralph.
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