Re: non-obvious help needed

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 09:59:26AM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here is some texi source:
> 
> >@menu
> >* unshar usage::                  unshar help/usage (--help)
> >@end menu
> >
> >@node unshar usage
> >@subsection unshar help/usage (--help)
> >
> >The text printed is the same whether selected with the @code{help} option
> >(--help) or the @code{more-help} option (-!).  @code{more-help} will print
> 
> The "--help" renders in the menu with both hyphens.
> The ones in the @subsection line and the later text
> are unhelpfully "fixed up" and render with one hyphen.

In normal text, --- is an 'em dash' (very long dash), and -- an 'en 
dash' (long dash), as in TeX.  Menu text is considered to be monospaced 
text, so the -- and --- are kept as is.

> How do I tell texi to leave my hyphens alone?

There are more than one way.  In monospace font context, the -- are kept
as is for instance.  Here the logical @-command is @option, like

 The text printed is the same whether selected with the @code{help}
 option (@option{--help}) or the @code{more-help} option (@option{-!}). 

> (The document is not hand edited, by the way.  I go
> to a lot of trouble to figure out how the program
> [unshar in this case] requests help and spread that
> information around the document.  

I can't really parse that sentence.  Do you mean that you call the 
program with --help, parse the result and generate automatically the
Texinfo code?

> Should I just replace
> all hyphens with "@-" for example?)

No, @- produces a discretionary hyphen, i.e., a place where TeX can 
(but does not have to) hyphenate. 

-- 
Pat