> The groff_char.7 documentation also lists the backquote u0040 and
> the apostrophe u0027.
Ah, yes. Silly me.
> Adding this to unicode.tmac fixes these:
>
> .char ` \[oq]
> .char ' \[cq]
OK.
> IIRC, in the C++ code, the font handling for the html and utf8
> devices is the same. Therefore I tried to add to html.tmac:
> .mso unicode.tmac
> and this fixes it!
OK, done.
> One problem is still left: What is now the recommended way to write a
> shell command line, in a way that is copy&pastable from at least the utf8
> and html outputs?
> - If I write "foo --help" in the utf8 output we get twice u2010.
> - If I write "foo \-\-help" in the utf8 output we get twice u2212.
A very good question. The standard solution is described in the
PROBLEMS file:
* The UTF-8 output of grotty has strange characters for the minus,
the hyphen, and the right quote. Why?
The used Unicode characters (U+2212 for the minus sign and U+2010
for the hyphen) are the correct ones, but many programs can't search
them properly. The same is true for the right quote (U+201D). To
map those characters back to the ASCII characters, insert the
following code snippet into the `troffrc' configuration file:
.if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
. char \- \N'45'
. char - \N'45'
. char ' \N'39'
.\}
However, this is an ugly hack and doesn't solve the very issue. With
the current means this problem is unsolvable, I believe.
> - If I write "foo \[u002D]\[u002D]help" then in the utf8 output
> we get twice u002D, as desired, but in the html processing I get
> "warning: can't find special character `u002D'". Hmm??
>
> It took me already some effort to convince the Linux manpages
> maintainer that \- should be used for copy&pastable commands in
> manpages. Do I have to recommend him to use \[u002D] now instead?
Using \[u002D] doesn't work with the latin1 device...
I see two possible solutions.
. Define a new grotty (pseudo) font `CR' which is the same as all
other fonts but contains an additional line
\- 24 0 0x002D
This is the solution which Gaius has implemented for grohtml
already (however, he always uses 0x002D for \-, not only for
fixed-width fonts -- something which should probably be changed).
I can imagine that most man pages already use \f[CR] for
displaying verbatim stuff (groff man pages being a notable
exception), so this should be rather straightforward.
. Introduce a new escape, say, `\=', which maps to U+002D. We would
thus have
- U+2010
\- U+2212
\= U+002D
Alternatively, we could exchange the meaning of \- and \=, having
- U+2010
\- U+00AD
\= U+2212
Sigh. How do other applications solve this mess?
Werner
