+.Fl T Cm html .
+But currently, no practically relevant manual page formatter requires
+that subtlety, so in manual pages, it is sufficient to write plain
+.Sq -
+to represent hyphen, minus, and hyphen-minus.
+.Pp
+If a word on a text input line contains a hyphen, a formatter may decide
+to insert an output line break after the hyphen if that helps filling
+the current output line, but the whole word would overflow the line.
+If it is important that the word is not broken across lines in this
+way, a zero-width space
+.Pq Sq \e&
+can be inserted before or after the hyphen.
+While
+.Xr mandoc 1
+never breaks the output line after hyphens adjacent to a zero-width
+space, after any of the other dash- or hyphen-like characters
+represented by escape sequences, or after hyphens inside words in
+macro arguments, other software may not respect these rules and may
+break the line even in such cases.
+.Pp
+Some
+.Xr roff 7
+implementations contains dictionaries allowing to break the line
+at syllable boundaries even inside words that contain no hyphens.
+Such automatic hyphenation is not supported by
+.Xr mandoc 1 ,
+which only breaks the line at whitespace, and inside words only
+after existing hyphens.
+.Ss Spaces
+To separate words in normal text, for indenting and alignment
+in literal context, and when none of the following special cases apply,
+just use the normal space character
+.Pq Sq \ .
+.Pp
+When filling text, output lines may be broken between words, i.e. at space
+characters.
+To prevent a line break between two particular words,
+use the unpaddable non-breaking space escape sequence
+.Pq Sq \e\ \&
+instead of the normal space character.
+For example, the input string
+.Dq number\e\ 1
+will be kept together as
+.Dq number\ 1
+on the same output line.
+.Pp
+On request and macro lines, the normal space character serves as an
+argument delimiter.
+To include whitespace into arguments, quoting is usually the best choice;
+see the MACRO SYNTAX section in
+.Xr roff 7 .
+In some cases, using the non-breaking space escape sequence
+.Pq Sq \e\ \&
+may be preferable.
+.Pp
+To escape macro names and to protect whitespace at the end
+of input lines, the zero-width space
+.Pq Sq \e&
+is often useful.
+For example, in
+.Xr mdoc 7 ,
+a normal space character can be displayed in single quotes in either
+of the following ways:
+.Pp
+.Dl .Sq \(dq \(dq
+.Dl .Sq \e \e&
+.Ss Quotes
+On request and macro lines, the double-quote character
+.Pq Sq \(dq
+is handled specially to allow quoting.
+One way to prevent this special handling is by using the
+.Sq \e(dq
+escape sequence.
+.Pp
+Note that on text lines, literal double-quote characters can be used
+verbatim.
+All other quote-like characters can be used verbatim as well,
+even on request and macro lines.
+.Ss Accents
+In output modes supporting such special output characters, for example
+.Fl T Cm pdf ,
+and sometimes less consistently in
+.Fl T Cm utf8 ,
+some
+.Xr roff 7
+formatters convert the following ASCII input characters to the
+following Unicode special output characters:
+.Bl -column x(ga U+2018 -offset indent
+.It \(ga Ta U+2018 Ta left single quotation mark
+.It \(aq Ta U+2019 Ta right single quotation mark
+.It \(ti Ta U+02DC Ta small tilde
+.It \(ha Ta U+02C6 Ta modifier letter circumflex
+.El
+.Pp
+In prose, this automatic substitution is often desirable;
+but when these characters have to be displayed as plain ASCII
+characters, for example in source code samples, they require
+escaping to render as follows:
+.Bl -column x(ga U+2018 -offset indent
+.It \e(ga Ta U+0060 Ta grave accent
+.It \e(aq Ta U+0027 Ta apostrophe
+.It \e(ti Ta U+007E Ta tilde
+.It \e(ha Ta U+005E Ta circumflex accent
+.El
+.Ss Periods
+The period
+.Pq Sq \&.
+is handled specially at the beginning of an input line,
+where it introduces a
+.Xr roff 7
+request or a macro, and when appearing alone as a macro argument in
+.Xr mdoc 7 .
+In such situations, prepend a zero-width space
+.Pq Sq \e&.
+to make it behave like normal text.
+.Pp
+Do not use the
+.Sq \e.
+escape sequence.
+It does not prevent special handling of the period.
+.Ss Backslashes
+To include a literal backslash
+.Pq Sq \e
+into the output, use the
+.Pq Sq \ee
+escape sequence.
+.Pp
+Note that doubling it
+.Pq Sq \e\e
+is not the right way to output a backslash.
+Because
+.Xr mandoc 1
+does not implement full
+.Xr roff 7
+functionality, it may work with
+.Xr mandoc 1 ,
+but it may have weird effects on complete
+.Xr roff 7
+implementations.
+.Sh SPECIAL CHARACTERS
+Special characters are encoded as
git.ckatri.com / mandoc.git / blobdiff