2 ms·

That's what you get when you don't think WYSIWYG as a necessity. Troff is not really unique in that there are many other markup languages with hyphen-minus-dash

That's what you get when you don't think WYSIWYG as a necessity. Troff is not really unique in that there are many other markup languages with hyphen-minus-dash distinctions, which may be detected contextually, distinguished from various states, or have to be manually marked as such. Any such distinction is a potential mistake open for users, but WYSIWYG provides an immediate feedback so that many mistakes can be readily corrected. Even a semi-WYSIWYG interface like a side-by-side preview would work great, to slightly lesser extent---it is rare to see a Markdown editor not paired with a preview. To my knowledge this is never a norm in troff, I'm not even sure if there does exist a preview editor for troff (contrary to TeX and friends!), and unless such editor can be made a norm, troff should be better shelved for good.

cultureswitch 3y ago
WYSIWYG editors make this problem worse, not better. It is extremely common, if not expected, for a WYSIWYG editor to change the character that has been typed by the user to a different character which the editor thinks better corresponds to the intention of the user. That very principle is essentially wrong. And in a WYSIWYG editor, the user is not necessarily aware that this "helpful" change has taken place. In particular, the user will not be aware if the characters are visually identical. Typesetting concerns only belong to typesetting tools. And even then, almost all these typesetting rules relating to quotes and dashes are obscure, actively debated, dependent on language and most important of all, completely useless.