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From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
To: discuss@mdocml.bsd.lv
Subject: Dashes and strange markup
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2017 12:17:30 +0100
Message-ID: <86wpc2ac39.fsf@desk.des.no>
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I came across a FreeBSD man page that left me scratching my head, and I
was hoping you could explain what is going on and how to fix it.  Let me
show you the output first:

     The file that goes by the name of beastie.4th is a set of commands
     designed to draw the ASCII art FreeBSD mascot =E2=80=94 known simply a=
s beastie =E2=80=94
     to the right of the boot loader menu.  The commands of beastie.4th by

Nicely formatted with Unicode em-dashes, both in FreeBSD 10 (which uses
groff) and FreeBSD 11 (which uses mandoc).  But whatis tells a different
story:

| % uname -r
| 10.3-RELEASE-p11
| % PAGER=3Dcat whatis beastie
| beastie.4th(8)           - FreeBSD ASCII art boot module

fine, but:

| des@hive ~% uname -r=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=
=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=
=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20
| 11.0-RELEASE-p2
| des@hive ~% PAGER=3Dcat whatis beastie
| beastie.4th(8) - FreeBSD ASCII art boot module known simply as beastie to=
 the right of the boot loader menu. [...]

I cut it short, but it prints out the entire DESCRIPTION section instead
of just the document description.

Here's an excerpt from the source:

| .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.

So apparently Nd was (ab)used for an en- or em-dash, and I can sort of
understand it because it is documented to "print a dash followed by its
arguments", and mandoc's makewhatis is less forgiving than groff.

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?

(I also replaced .Ic with .Em, but that's completely orthogonal)

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).  Then again, I'm not sure how this will
affect line wrapping, so perhaps I should follow Oxford's example and
switch from an em-dash without spaces to an en-dash with spaces...  but
I'd still like to know if there's a better way to suppress the spaces.

[*] see for instance the Chicago Manual of Style and older editions of
the Oxford Style Manual.

DES
--=20
Dag-Erling Sm=C3=B8rgrav - des@des.no
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