Re: Tilde (~) in bash(1) is typeset incorrectly as Unicode character

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in
 <20230729002703.LASpS%steffen@sdaoden.eu>:
 |Chet Ramey wrote in
 | <2fd2ed52-3272-3433-6179-164bc51220c7@case.edu>:
 |  ...
 ||> At 2023-07-26T10:47:05+0200, Thomas ten Cate wrote:
 ||>> In the bash manual page (`man bash`), the ASCII tilde character '~'
 ||>> (0x7e) is replaced by the Unicode character '˜' (U+02DC SMALL TILDE):
 ||>>
 ||>>      $ man bash | grep 'additional binary operator'
 ||>>                    An additional binary operator, =˜, is available,
 ||>>
 ||>> The same happens for the use of ~ as a shorthand for the home
 ||>> directory. This makes the manual page incorrect, and difficult to
 ||>> search.
 | ...
 ||>> I don't know the first thing about groff, but `man groff_char`
 ||>> suggests that ~ is indeed rendered as "modifier tilde", and that one
 ||>> should write \(ti to obtain an actual tilde character.
 ...
 |If i grep the manuals in the BSD git repo then they would benefit
 |from that decision; whereas ~ in paths is not often used, (ti is
 |never, unless i have overseen it.  \(ti / \[ti] for ASCII tilde in
 |UNIX manuals, code blocks, formulas etc is just sick.  And then

Having said that it seems that Linux man-pages and man-pages-posix
actively switched towards \[ti] in 2020 according to its
Changes.old, saying

  Various pages
      Michael Kerrisk  [Geoff Clare]
          Use "\(ti" instead of "~"
              A naked tilde ("~") renders poorly in PDF. Instead use "\(ti",
              which renders better in a PDF, and produces the same glyph
              when rendering on a terminal.

resulting in 53, and the latter uses \(ti, but lots of that is awk
operator stuff etc.  One thread member is credited for that
release btw.

Well i personally continue to find this sad given that UNIX
manuals started being written in the 70s differently, making it
over 45 years, something around that.  And i find the reasoning
mysterious even given that you can always create a different
mapping in case you really want it, no?, so why not simply do that
for PDF instead (.ie 'pdf'\*[.T]')?  No.

Thank you all for your patience, and a nice weekend i wish.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)