Hyphens in man pages

Additional notes:

* In my experience, the hyphen is usually very short in most fonts, the en dash is significantly longer, and the em dash can be much less than double the en dash (some of this may be a result of poor font design though. Monospace fonts have it rough!).

* It's widely recommended to avoid writing U+2010 and just use U+002D for hyphens. Hyphens are by far the most common of these punctuation symbols, so it's ludicrous that `man` pages to map them by default; most man pages will never want any kind of dash.

* Soft hyphen support sucks.

* For different reasons, it's rare to manually write U+2212, since you should generally tell your typesetting engine to switch to math mode (which also takes care of inserting the right obscure kinds of spaces).

* En dash is also used as a higher-level hyphen, when the inputs are already compound (not necessarily with hyphens!).

* En dash with spaces around it is an alternate style equivalent to em dash without spaces, for uses like a comma/colon/reverse-colon/parenthesis. A given work should only use one for consistency. In casually written text, space-asciidash-space is almost always intended as an en dash.

* Em dash is also the thing to use for interruption; there are several subcases here. This is the only time an em dash can potentially touch a space, though except for self-interruption they're generally inside quotes so won't actually.

* When there's a parenthetical interruption by the narrator, the em dash goes outside the quotes (“Foo”—bar—“baz”).

* Em dashes are also used for attribution after a quote, or for signatures. This is supposed to always be the start of a line, but if you're sloppy I guess it might be preceded by a space here too.

* U+2012 figure dash is probably the only other dash worth knowing; use it with digits. There's also a "figure space" you should use for monospace-like padding in a non-monospace font.

Specifically ligatures in monospaced fonts is what finally prompted me to turn them off in my userChrome.css file.

I would be a little bit less repulsed by them if they took up the right amount of space, but they’d still be an abomination.

That's how you can see whether the writer uses a Mac or not.

Windows doesn't do that.

Mac also changes quotes, like

    let magic = "MAGIC";
    

to

    let magic = “MAGIC”;

There's the counter-issue of trying to search for some specific character, and instead matching the generic one. For example, searching "ā" on chrome or firefox finds all "a"s, which is extremely annoying if there's one "ā" on a page you want to find, and thousands of "a"s everywhere.

For dashes, if done right, it could be useful to be able to search the separate ones too - i.e. search for flag dashes but not ones in prose.

> The problem is search functions.

No, that's not it; there are some further issues mentioned in the thread and the linked bug reports, like man pages containing command line options that can't be copy/pasted into a terminal (because they consist of Unicode hyphens).

That too perhaps, but they really are a simple hyphen and should not be changed.

If I'm reading a man page via `less`, I want find the next option with a simple search function i.e. /-

> Surprisingly often, the composition of high-quality technical documentation requires the engagement of a human brain.

Funny at that, too: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html

IDK

> Mapping all hyphens and minus signs to a single character, as people whose blood pressure spikes over this issue tend to promote as a first resort, is an ineluctably information-discarding operation. In my opinion, man page source documents are not the correct place to discard that information.

Treating all dashes as minus signs within the context of man pages sounds perfectly fine to me (even though it can be unacceptable in other situations). I see man pages as a sort of an extension of code, be it shell code or C code. If hyphens started to creep into my code I'd be furious.

I am not sure (and too lazy to check) if the issue is with groff vs mandoc (the typesetters) or instead with tmac.an aka -man vs tmac.doc aka -mdoc (the macro packages, one presentational, the other semantic) — note the confusingly similar names. I understand the BSDs have been switching their pages to -mdoc for the most part, but on a typical Linux system you’ll find both used quite a lot (and even for GNU software, most though not all will not have come from the GNU project, what with that project being actively hostile to man pages).

In which case the entire troff manual should be discarded and replaced with plain text. What you see is what you get. Case closed.

In the overwhelming majority of fonts, it’s not a minus sign, as you can see from it being vertically positioned in the middle of a lowercase n instead of in the middle of a lining digit, like the plus sign is. (Neither is it a dash, being both too short and too thick.) It’s a weird hybrid of a hyphen and a minus that was introduced on typewriters to save a key and the accompanying mechanics. (For the same reason and with about as much respect for typography, many of them neglected to have numerals 0 and 1 separate from the Latin capital letters O and I.)

Unicode, unlike typewriters and ASCII, but following half a millenium of book printing tradition, encodes a hyphen and a minus separately. (Also a number of dashes, though perhaps fewer than medieval printers used.) The weird thing it resorts to calling HYPHEN-MINUS also has to be encoded and will probably persist in computer code (including Unix program arguments) forever, but in texts targeted at humans it has no place. The inadequacy of your (and my) keyboard is regrettable, but doesn’t really make for a great argument here.

For command-line parameters, yes. For everything else, I can understand that the writer would want to express more semantics in the character than just 'minus'.

In fact, I would guess that anything else than 2d as a command-line parameter prefix is a bug (bar using a /).

That said, normalization when searching is useful.

There is a way, of course, of getting the correct hyphen-minus, and that’s by using ‘\-’. Almost all manual pages do this, including manual page generators, because the “problem” (which is just troff syntax) is well known and well documented.

For me `info` is a last resort. Though usually I do `man whatever` in a browser tab rather than a console.

how would hypertext help you find a flag mentioned in the text description of another flag?