Re: Dashes and strange markup

["Anthony J. Bentley" <anthony@anjbe.name>]

Dag-Erling Smørgrav writes:
> | .Sh NAME
> | .Nm beastie.4th
> | .Nd FreeBSD ASCII art boot module
> | .Sh DESCRIPTION
> | The file that goes by the name of
> | .Nm
> | is a set of commands designed to draw the ASCII art FreeBSD mascot
> | .Nd known simply as
> | .Ic beastie
> | .Nd to the right of the boot loader menu.

Mandoc's behavior aside, this manual should be using \(em or \(en instead
of .Nd here.

> The next issue is that I tried to replace .Nd with either \(en and \(em,
> but the former is rendered as a single hyphen and the latter as two
> hyphens, instead of actual en- or em-dashes.  Is that intentional?

\(en and \(em become en and em dashes in a Unicode locale. In an ASCII
locale, they become one and two hyphens, respectively.

> The third issue is that according to conventional English typography[*],
> the correct usage is an em-dash with no surrounding spaces, and I can't
> figure out how to suppress the spaces, short of gluing everything
> together (like\(em\&this).

I don't really understand the question here. If you put spaces in,
there will be spaces. If you don't, there won't be. It's common usage
to just leave out the spaces. For example, with double quotes:

  \(lqquotation here\(rq

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley
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