[ovs-dev] [PATCH 1/2] ovs-ofctl: Consistently escape '-' in group documentation

[Ben Pfaff]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:17:53PM +0900, YAMAMOTO Takashi wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 11:53:53AM +0900, YAMAMOTO Takashi wrote:
> >> hi,
> >> 
> >> > I am unsure of the reason for escaping '-' inside of control
> >> > sequences but regardless this patch makes the group documentation
> >> > consistent with other portions of the ovs-ofctl(8) in this regard.
> >> 
> >> afaik you should not escape hyphens.
> >> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mandoc_char++NetBSD-current
> > 
> > Thanks. So would you suggest the opposite approach to this patch:
> > replacing '\-' with '-'?
> 
> yes.
> 
> it's a good idea to check pdf output, where the difference can
> matter much.

In my opinion, in manpages, the choice between - and \- should depend
on the factors listed in the webpage you cite (which I did not know
about; thank you for the citation), but additionally upon whether one
intends the current text to be taken as literal text.  A traditional
typewriter (or computer keyboard) does not have different glyphs for
hyphen and minus sign and en dash and em dash, and so I expect literal
text, which I think of as being in a font that imitates a typewriter,
as having only one glyph for these, which looks like a minus sign.
This is what happens in typical typography in TeX derivatives such as
Texinfo and LaTeX, where writing something like @verbatim{-} or
\texttt{-} produces a minus sign.

So, when I write literal text in manpages for Open vSwitch, I always
use \- instead of -, because I want it to look like a literal text
minus sign.  This is therefore the convention you will most often find
in Open vSwitch manpages.  I do not know whether it is correct or
incorrect (maybe it is wrong), but it is what is most common in OVS.