svn commit: r315850 - head/sys/boot/forth

[Conrad Meyer]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 4:21 AM, Bruce Evans <brde at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2017, [UTF-8] Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
>
>> Log:
>>  The original author abused Nd (one-line description, used by makewhatis)
>>  for its side effect of producing an en-dash.  This broke whatis with
>>  newer versions of mdocml.  Use \(en instead.
>
>
> Nd (or is it mumble-dash?) is broken for all man pages.  Old man renders
> the dash for Nd as 2 hyphens in ascii.  New man renders it as 1 hyphen in
> ascii.  postscript output is even more broken.  Old man renders the dash
> for Nd as an especially wide one.  New man still seems to render it as 1
> hyphen, and hyphens are especially narrow in postscript output for new
> man (they are 1.5 to 2 times narrower than with old man, and that is with
> a larger font for the smaller hyphens).  Altogther, the dash for Nd is
> about 4 times larger with old man after adjusting for the font size
> (about 3 average characters wide instead of 3/4).
>
> Whatever the dash for Nd is, it shouldn't look like a hyphen.

Yep.  In this context an 'em' dash should be used instead of an 'en'
dash.  Theoretically, there also should not be spaces around the
dashes.  I'm not sure that's easy to do in manual pages, though.

http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html

Best,
Conrad