Subject: Re: Fwd: cannot search for -a in man inside mintty under cygwin-1.7
From: Andy Koppe <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:43:11 +0100
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

> moo.tinys wrote:
>>
>> using mintty
>> LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8 mintty
>> inside mintty:
>> $ man man
>> /-
>> Pattern not found  (press RETURN)

With UTF-8, hyphen/minus symbols in the man page are displays as the
Unicode codepoints for hyphen or minus. These are different from ASCII
'-', which is why your search didn't turn up anything.

This isn't mintty-specific.

Thomas Wolff:
> This was discussed here before but I'm not sure whether a solution was
> already outlined.
> The problem appeared on Linux too, some years ago, but has been fixed
> meanwhile.
> Differences are:
> man calls nroff -mandoc on cygwin, nroff -mandocdb on Linux. The latter
> macro package of groff includes the following which is prepended to the
> manual page before feeding it to nroff for formatting:
> .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \{\
> .  char \- \N'45'
> .  char  - \N'45'
> .  char  ' \N'39'
> .  char  ` \N'96'
> .\}

Thanks, glad to hear there is a fix. I'll use this in the mintty
manpage, so at least searching will work there.

Question: what's the *[.T] pattern matched against?

> Checking the program chain of 'man' with procps, some other macros are added
> already (simply using 'echo'), that's where it could also be added without a
> complete new macro package (i.e. without changing groff). However, the
> auxiliary roff codes are apparently hard-coded in man.exe so that'll have to
> be changed.

What are those auxiliary roff codes?

Andy

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