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I had never heard of G. Branden Robinson before, but his reply to this is extremely thoughtful and well written.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
> Surprisingly often, the composition of high-quality technical documentation requires the engagement of a human brain. Funny at that, too: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html
alexey-salmin 3y ago
IDK > Mapping all hyphens and minus signs to a single character, as people whose blood pressure spikes over this issue tend to promote as a first resort, is an ineluctably information-discarding operation. In my opinion, man page source documents are not the correct place to discard that information. Treating all dashes as minus signs within the context of man pages sounds perfectly fine to me (even though it can be unacceptable in other situations). I see man pages as a sort of an extension of code, be it shell code or C code. If hyphens started to creep into my code I'd be furious.
- jrmg 3y ago
  I’d disagree that it’s information-discarding. At a technical level, yes, okay. At a human level? No. To a human reading the man page, these characters look basically identical on screen. Sure, one is sometimes, in some fonts, a bit bolder and/or a bit of a different length - but even when that’s true it’s hard to discern without context. So an actual _reader_ of these characters depends on context to know what one they’re seeing anyway. Literally no information is lost between the source text and the reader by using either. Just use minus signs in the man pages. Trying to force everyone to care about the difference between dash/hyphen/minus sign is an unwinnable battle. There’s only one key on their keyboard, and that’s what they’re going to press. And there’s not enough context to do anything automatic to correct it. You could maybe make an argument about accessibility for screen readers - but I’m pretty sure they’re always going to have to cope with minus-sign-as-dash for ever too (see argument about humans using keyboards, and the inability to do anything automatic to correct it). The only actual, real-world, outcome _worth caring about_ of treating these differently is that, if they are treated differently, people can’t search for or copy/paste command line arguments. Using minus signs is the better choice for most people.
  - ccooffee 3y ago
    In the fonts I use, I've never noticed a difference between hyphen/dash/endash/minus. But (as alluded to in the intro of the submitted message) some fonts will render it differently. I would not be surprised if various screen-reading software handles them differently. So for some people, rewriting all of them into '-' would be information-discarding. (However, I'd not be surprised if there are more "incorrect" hyphen/dash/minus issues in many code bases than "correct" ones...)

> Surprisingly often, the composition of high-quality technical documentation requires the engagement of a human brain. Funny at that, too: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html

alexey-salmin 3y ago

IDK > Mapping all hyphens and minus signs to a single character, as people whose blood pressure spikes over this issue tend to promote as a first resort, is an ineluctably information-discarding operation. In my opinion, man page source documents are not the correct place to discard that information. Treating all dashes as minus signs within the context of man pages sounds perfectly fine to me (even though it can be unacceptable in other situations). I see man pages as a sort of an extension of code, be it shell code or C code. If hyphens started to creep into my code I'd be furious.

jrmg 3y ago
I’d disagree that it’s information-discarding. At a technical level, yes, okay. At a human level? No. To a human reading the man page, these characters look basically identical on screen. Sure, one is sometimes, in some fonts, a bit bolder and/or a bit of a different length - but even when that’s true it’s hard to discern without context. So an actual _reader_ of these characters depends on context to know what one they’re seeing anyway. Literally no information is lost between the source text and the reader by using either. Just use minus signs in the man pages. Trying to force everyone to care about the difference between dash/hyphen/minus sign is an unwinnable battle. There’s only one key on their keyboard, and that’s what they’re going to press. And there’s not enough context to do anything automatic to correct it. You could maybe make an argument about accessibility for screen readers - but I’m pretty sure they’re always going to have to cope with minus-sign-as-dash for ever too (see argument about humans using keyboards, and the inability to do anything automatic to correct it). The only actual, real-world, outcome _worth caring about_ of treating these differently is that, if they are treated differently, people can’t search for or copy/paste command line arguments. Using minus signs is the better choice for most people.
- ccooffee 3y ago
  In the fonts I use, I've never noticed a difference between hyphen/dash/endash/minus. But (as alluded to in the intro of the submitted message) some fonts will render it differently. I would not be surprised if various screen-reading software handles them differently. So for some people, rewriting all of them into '-' would be information-discarding. (However, I'd not be surprised if there are more "incorrect" hyphen/dash/minus issues in many code bases than "correct" ones...)