Re: @math{-} does not produce a minus sign in Info

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2022 at 03:28:33PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Use the '@minus{}' command to generate a minus sign.  In a fixed-width
> font, this is a single hyphen, but in a proportional font, the symbol is
> the customary length for a minus sign--a little longer than a hyphen,
> shorter than an em-dash:
> 
>      '-' is a minus sign generated with '@minus{}',
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (where '-' is the ASCII hyphen-minus), which is incorrect: in the
> MPFR manual, I get the real minus sign '−'. I suspect that the
> difference is due to the chosen encoding. But the manual is silent
> on this point.

It is not very elaborated, but in the "Invoking texi2any from a Shell"
node, there is, for --enable-encoding/--disable-encoding, there is:

 By default, or with --enable-encoding, output accented and special
 characters in Info and plain text output based on the document encoding.

This implies that if the encoding does not have a character for the
Unicode codepoint used for @minus, something else will be used.  In that
case an ASCII hyphen is a good choice.

-- 
Pat