On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 11:08:15AM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 23:22:27 +0100
> Jonathan Neuschäfer <j.neuschaefer@gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> > Without double-backticks, Sphinx wrongly turns "--version" into
> > "–version" with a Unicode EN DASH (U+2013), that is visually easy to
> > confuse with a single ASCII dash.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Jonathan Neuschäfer <j.neuschaefer@gmx.net>
> 
> This certainly seems worth addressing.  But I would *really* rather find
> a way to tell Sphinx not to do that rather than making all of these
> tweaks - which we will certainly find ourselves having to do over and
> over again.  I can try to look into that in a bit, but if somebody were
> to beat me to it ... :)

This seems to do the trick:


diff --git a/Documentation/conf.py b/Documentation/conf.py
index 3c7bdf4cd31f..8f2a7ae95184 100644
--- a/Documentation/conf.py
+++ b/Documentation/conf.py
@@ -587,6 +587,9 @@ pdf_documents = [
 kerneldoc_bin = '../scripts/kernel-doc'
 kerneldoc_srctree = '..'

+# Render -- as two dashes
+smartquotes = False
+
 # ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 # Since loadConfig overwrites settings from the global namespace, it has to be
 # the last statement in the conf.py file

(Documentation at https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/configuration.html#confval-smartquotes)


Jonathan Neuschäfer