Fwd: Re: mandoc rendering of \*(--

Fwd: Re: mandoc rendering of \*(--

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Forgot to forward this, sorry...

> Dear Kristaps,
>
> when rendering the following example with "pod2man example.pm | mandoc"
> the character sequence "--" is rendered as "O-".
>
> --------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------
> =head1 Principle of Least Surprise
>
> Perl does the parsing -- no surprises.
> --------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------
>
> Tested with mandoc 1.10.8 from OpenBSD's source tree.
>
> Kind regards,
> Andreas

Andreas,

Note that this is being CC'd to tech@mdocml, so that this issue is
documented.  I'm pretty sure it's been reported before.

So yeah... pod2man... this is a well-known "issue" wherein

  \*(--

is assigned by a `ds' to

  \(*W-

If you look in mandoc_char.7, you'll see that *W is the special
character capital Greek omega (O).  So mandoc outputs "O-".  Makes
sense, right?

However, pod2man runs `tr \(*W-', which makes all instances of \(*W be
turned into -.  mandoc doesn't (yet) support `tr'.  So basically,
pod2man overwrites the default character behaviour of the Greek omega.

Since pod2man masks special characters in its input (it re-writes "\*(W"
as "\e*(W"), apparently they think this is ok.  I think it's a dumb
hack, but whatever.

Anyway, I'll add a note to the TODO that `tr' should be implemented.  It
doesn't look too hard and will fix the problem.

Thanks,

Kristaps
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