man -t converts - to −

Question

man -t ls converts - to −. Is there a way I can tell man -t to not do that?

I prefer having -, as the - is often part of examples where − would be wrong (e.g. options).

Check out also this question for man and double-quotes; the equivalent here is (echo '.tr \--'; zcat $(man -w ls)) | man -tl - — meuh, Mar 31 '17 at 08:06

Ned64 · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-30T18:17:00.180

4

In the original file, the minus '-' symbols really are backslashified to '\-' which would then be interpreted in the way you do not like.

A solution is to filter the file before feeding it to man for formatting:

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | man -tl - > ls-normal.ps

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | sed 's/\\-/-/g' | man -tl - > ls-minus.ps

The second form replaces the '−'s with '-'s on my system.

PS: My previous answer was wrong - apologies!

edited Mar 30 '17 at 18:17

answered Mar 30 '17 at 17:29

Ned64

1

@Ned64 +1 — the root cause is that in troff, \- encodes "minus" (which is appropriate for options, and produces output which can be copy-pasted to the command-line), whereas - encodes "hyphen". groff now treats both in the same way for text output (and HTML, at least in Debian), but apparently not for PostScript. – Stephen Kitt Mar 30 '17 at 18:38

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