[bug #50917] Make \- consistently render as U+002D across all macro sets and devices

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #50917 (project groff):

Hello Bruno - wrt comment #2:

note that this issue is marked as "invalid - closed", so there is nothing to
do in groff.

That said, using help2man(1) is very bad practice.  It always results in
manual pages of extremely low content quality.  If you feel that you must
auto-generate manual pages, then please use the perlpod(1) input format.  The
transformation tool, pod2man(1), generates the best quality autogenerated
man(7) code i'm aware of.  Of course, it provides no semantic markup and it is
not quite as pretty as properly hand-written man(7) or mdoc(7) code, but it is
tolerable.

That said, representing hyphen-minus as \- is best practice.  Unfortunately,
there is no better option, and none can be designed.

groff -Thtml is notoriously weak, so it's no big surprise that it has many
problems.  That's unrelated to the (unfortunately fatally flawed) idea
discussed in this bug tracker entry.

Above all, every language is designed for writing it manually, and the
question of how to represent hyphen-minus is common to the man(7) and mdoc(7)
languages.  In particular, practically all BSD documentation is hand-written
in mdoc(7), and much of non-BSD documentation is hand-written in man(7).  So
even though quite some man(7) code is autogenerated (which it is, you are
right about that, just consider all the Perl documentation), it is still
important to keep writing manual pages simple and non-ugly for human authors,
so introducing \(hm is not an option, unfortunately.

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