Re: Escaping hyphens ("real" minus signs in groff)

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Deri,

On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 at 18:42, Deri <deri@chuzzlewit.myzen.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, 21 January 2021 11:03:13 GMT Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> > > And I mean copy-and-paste not just from PDF but from a terminal window.
> >
> > Yes, but I have a question: "\-1" renders in PDF as a long dash
> > followed by a "1". This looks okay in PDF, but if I copy and paste
> > into a terminal, I don't get an ASCII 45. Seems seems to contradict
> > what you are saying about cut-and-paste above. What am I missing?
>
> If I do:-
>
> echo "- \- \[fi]"|groff -Tpdf | okular -
>
> I see a hyphen, minus and fi ligature. Copying to a text document gives hyphen
> hyphen f i. The reason is because gropdf adds a ToUnicode CMAP entry to fonts
> which used the text.enc encoding when created with afmtodit. You can see a
> difference if you run:-
>
> echo "- \- \[fi]"|groff -Tpdf -P-u | okular -
>
> Which prevents the CMAP entry, and when you copy to text the minus unicode cha
> character is seen. (On my system the fi ligature is separated into f i still
> but I suspect that is KDE being "helpful").

Thanks! That's a helpful explanation!

Cheers,

Michael


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/