nonstop/termit — pull request #55 by thkoch2001 (2012-06-08 15:09:50+00:00)
Title: fix hyphen-used-as-minus-sign in manpage

from
http://lintian.debian.org/tags/hyphen-used-as-minus-sign.html

This manual page seems to contain a hyphen where a minus sign was intended. By default, "-" chars are interpreted as hyphens (U+2010) by groff, not as minus signs (U+002D). Since options to programs use minus signs (U+002D), this means for example in UTF-8 locales that you cannot cut and paste options, nor search for them easily. The Debian groff package currently forces "-" to be interpreted as a minus sign due to the number of manual pages with this problem, but this is a Debian-specific modification and hopefully eventually can be removed.

"-" must be escaped ("\-") to be interpreted as minus. If you really intend a hyphen (normally you don't), write it as "\(hy" to emphasise that fact. See groff(7) and especially groff_char(7) for details, and also the thread starting with http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200303/msg01481.html

If you use some tool that converts your documentation to groff format, this tag may indicate a bug in the tool. Some tools convert dashes of any kind to hyphens. The safe way of converting dashes is to convert them to "\-".

Because this error can occur very often, Lintian shows only the first 10 occurrences for each man page and give the number of suppressed occurrences. If you want to see all warnings, run Lintian with the -d/--debug option.

Refer to /usr/share/doc/groff-base/README.Debian and the groff_char(7) manual page for details.