netplan manual page contains U+2010 in option names instead of regular U+002D hyphen

[Nick Tait]

While attempting to search the netplan manual page for "ipv6-privacy", I discovered that all searches for options containing "-" (Unicode character 002D) fail, and this is because the manual pages have these dashes replaced with "‐" (Unicode character 2010). While the characters look almost identical, they are in fact different characters, which creates problems when searching the manual pages, or when copying and pasting options from the manual pages into configuration files.

From Googling it sounds like this problem is quite common with manual pages generated using the *roff tools? According to the following sources it sounds like the source documents needs to precede dashes with a backslash?

See:
https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/
https://www.caichinger.com/blog/2006/09/06/man_hyphens/

Thanks,
Nick.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.10
Package: netplan.io 0.107-5ubuntu0.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.5.0-15.15-generic 6.5.3
Uname: Linux 6.5.0-15-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.27.0-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CloudArchitecture: x86_64
CloudID: none
CloudName: none
CloudPlatform: none
CloudSubPlatform: config
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat Jan 27 21:48:43 2024
InstallationDate: Installed on 2021-07-24 (917 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo" - Release amd64 (20210421)
SourcePackage: netplan.io
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to mantic on 2023-11-05 (83 days ago)

[Lukas Märdian (slyon)]

We're currently using "Pandoc" to generate the manpages from markdown files. So we cannot directly modify the unicode character, but need to find the corresponding configuration option for Pandoc.

Do you have any suggestion of how that would work?

[Nick Tait (nick.t)]

I have no experience with Pandoc, but I found this by Googling: https://pandoc.org/releases.html

It isn't clear to me whether you should or shouldn't specify "\-", but I gather that the behaviour has changed in different versions? Maybe if you search for "\-" the release notes will make more sense to you?

[Lukas Märdian (slyon)]

This sounds like the issue might be fixed in pandoc 3.1.10, but we don't have that version in Ubuntu (or Debian), yet.

I'll mark the pandoc package as affected.