Re: with HTML output, @minus{} is converted to a hyphen instead of a real minus character

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 01:13:07AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> With Texinfo 6.8 and HTML output, @minus{} is converted to a hyphen
> instead of a real minus character (U+2212 MINUS SIGN).

It should depend on --enable-encoding and USE_NUMERIC_ENTITY.  In the
upcoming release, if --enable-encoding is not set, entities or ASCII are
used if possible.  For minus, an ASCII minus sign is output in HTML in
the default case.  If --enable-encoding is not set and
USE_NUMERIC_ENTITY is set, a numeric entity representing U+2212 should
be used.  If --enable-encoding is set the encoded character
corresponding to U+2212 should be output.

In the upcoming release, another option is to use an init file to
modify how 'minus' is formatted, which could be along

texinfo_register_no_arg_command_formatting('minus', undef, '−');

> In the tp/Texinfo/Convert/HTML.pm code, I can see a change by
> commit 9190ec13c30:
> 
> +my %special_list_bullet_css_string_no_arg_command = (
> +# tried to use HYPHEN BULLET \2043 for use as in a bullet list, but, at least
> +# with my test of firefox the result is very different from a bullet.
> +# hyphen minus or hyphen \2010 are even smaller than hyphen bullet.
> +# Use the Unicode codepoint used normally is for a mathematical minus \2212
> +# even though it is too large, but the others are too short...
> +# (which is actually the default, but this could change).
> +  #'minus' => '-',
> +  #'minus' => '\2010 ',
> +  'minus' => '\2212 ',
> +);
> [...]
> 
> but is it specific to lists as described or does this solve the
> more general problem?

Indeed, this part is specific to lists.

-- 
Pat