Groff 1.23 changes the way bare dashes are interpreted:¹
The hyphenation patterns for English have been updated using the
hyph-en-us.tex patterns file from the TeX hyph-utf8 project. The
new patterns likely will change the automatic hyphenation break
points of your English documents.
…
The an (man) and doc (mdoc) macro packages no longer remap the -, ',
and ` input characters to Basic Latin code points on UTF-8 devices,
but treat them as groff normally does (and AT&T troff before it did)
for typesetting devices, where they become the hyphen, apostrophe or
right single quotation mark, and left single quotation mark,
respectively. This change is expected to expose glyph usage errors in
man pages. See the "PROBLEMS" file for a recipe that will conceal
these errors. A better long-term approach is for man pages to adopt
correct input practices; the man pages groff_man_style(7),
groff_char(7), and man-pages(7) (subsection "Generating optimal
glyphs"; from the Linux man-pages project) contain such instructions.
Doing so also improves man page typography when formatting for PDF.
This is already causing controversy and Debian has patched it back to the old behavior.² LWN has a good summary of why such a seemingly minor display change has acute negative consequences.³
Groff 1.23 changes the way bare dashes are interpreted:¹
This is already causing controversy and Debian has patched it back to the old behavior.² LWN has a good summary of why such a seemingly minor display change has acute negative consequences.³
¹ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2023-07/msg00001.html ² https://lwn.net/ml/debian-devel/ZS0aV4XyJH+O1o%2Fc@riva.ucam.org/ ³ https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/