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Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and m
by kbenson 2y ago
Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason.
I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an indicator of generated output, even if it may be processed in some manner.
- tedunangst 2y agoThis is because the original was written using the wrong markup. When the output was ascii, nobody noticed, but it matters when the output is unicode.
- o11c 2y agoThat's revisionism. It was considered correct historically, before someone decided to unilaterally declare all existing man pages "wrong".
- tedunangst 2y agoIt's like we spent twenty years writing (mindlessly copying) web pages with &mdash and only viewing them with lynx, and then somebody makes a graphical browser and the mistake is apparent, but I don't think the browser is in the wrong.
- blueflow 2y agoContext: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html Money quote: This issue does indeed have a history of provoking unhinged lunacy.