Comment 12 for bug 47011

The rendering of hyphens as the Unicode HYPHEN character is a groff bug. I'd decided not to do this a while back, but evidently missed the case of automatic hyphenation.

groff (1.18.1.1-7) unstable; urgency=low

  * Too many fonts are missing the Unicode HYPHEN character, so I give up.
    Render "-" as HYPHEN-MINUS (ASCII 0x2D) by default. (Of course, manual
    pages using "-" when they should be using "\-" should still be fixed.)

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:57:51 +0000

Your problems at the Linux console are probably due to a couple of interwoven bugs in console-setup, which have been fixed in Gutsy. In the meantime, try running 'sudo setupcon' at the console to set it up properly.

The discussion about quote marks in this bug is really quite confused. If groff were using ASCII quotes, you couldn't possibly be seeing unreadable characters! All characters in ASCII are in every font you might reasonably choose to use. groff already follows Markus Kuhn's recommendations where it can (i.e. when using the UTF-8 device and when manual pages haven't been poorly written such that it's been explicitly instructed not to do so). As far as the rendering of ` and ' is concerned, note that groff is a typographical markup language and not something that just passes through whatever characters it receives; groff_char(7) documents that ` renders as a left single quotation mark and ' renders as a right single quotation mark, and that you can use \` and \(aq if you want the corresponding literal ASCII characters. Note that Markus Kuhn's web page even explicitly mentions troff as a program where ` can continue to be used as before.