[Pkg-shadow-devel] gpasswd, newgrp and gshadow man pages

[Alexander Gattin]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:04:59PM +0200, Nicolas François wrote:
> > Most of changes it is replace s,-,\-,
> > Any reasons ? I don't see any kind of incorrect rendefing roff files 
> > without this changes.
> 
> Here is a small explanation:
> '-' in roff is an hyphen, '\-' is a minus sign.
> On ISO-8859 terminals, there is no difference.
> 
> However, on an UTF-8 terminal, there is a small difference on the display
> (hyphen is usually smaller), and this break searches (there is no way to
> type an hyphen, so if you want to search the -s option, you have to search
> for " .s ") or cut&paste (if you cut&paste an example, then an hyphen is
> pasted on the terminal; but option must start by a minus sign, not an
> hyphen).

Yes, I confirm. But in Debian, almost all manpages are
plagued by the problem. So I can't conveniently search
for -x options on my utf-8 terminal. Also, most
_console_ fonts (i.e. on unicode vtX) simply don't have
a proper symbol for hyphen, so usually there's some
crap or cyrillic symbol placed instead.

Seems that the _only console font_ appropriate for
displaying manpages is LatArCyrHeb[-16]...

Until you mentioned this, I didn't know who/what to
blame for this sh.t.

> While I think using - instead of \- is a bug, using \- instead of - is IMO
> not a bug (because this behave like on old terminals).

I agree.
-- 
WBR,
xrgtn