Re: non-obvious help needed

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Eli,

The reason for wanting TeX/texi to just leave my text alone is that
it is very much a big nuisance to have man pages treat text one way,
mdoc another and texi still another.  Minimizing the amount of sedding
required to keep each formatter happy is a _real_ good thing.
If I am understanding correctly, the texi stance is, "You should never
want to do that, so we should be able to fiddle it any way we like".
I'd prefer the position that unless there is a compelling reason to
eat one of my hyphens, it should not be necessary to go through
gauntlets to keep hyphens from being eaten.

To be just a little bit clearer, here is my problem:

First, someone describes the meaning of an option using a paragraph
(or two or three).  Then this paragraph gets pasted into man pages,
mdocs and texinfo documentation.  Everything looks fine, except that
a hyphen is missing from the text someone wrote when it is presented
via some texinfo derivative (.info or .html, for example).  I guess
I could be very happy if I had some way to tell texi to leave my
hyphens alone -- and any other magically handled characters, too,
that I may not know about.  It really is not clear in the docs that
hyphens are treated specially.

My preference is not based on my not wanting to write texi docs
the texinfo way, but rather I want to be able to extract plain text
paragraphs and have them rendered with the same characters in the
various output formats.  I do not have the ability to compel
clients to type descriptive text the texinfo way.  :(

Thank you for anything you can do to help that isn't too hard to do.

Regards, Bruce