From: Jan Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T23:12:37+09:00
Subject: Re: bug in rdoc?

On 10/16/06, Morton Goldberg <m_goldberg@ameritech.net> wrote:
> On Oct 16, 2006, at 7:10 AM, Wybo Dekker wrote:
>
> > -- The following example, is taken from the rdoc documentation.
> > For the long options, it converts -- into  &#8212; (a long hyphen)
> > instead of two separate hyphens with some whitespace in between.
> > (see www.servalys.nl/ doc/index.html for the output)
> >
> > =begin rdoc
> >
> > <tt>--output</tt> <i>name [, name]</i>::
> >     specify the name of one or more output files. If multiple
> >     files are present, the first is used as the index.
> >
> > <tt>--quiet:</tt>:: do not output the names, sizes, byte counts,
> >                     index areas, or bit ratios of units as
> >                     they are processed.
> >
> > =end
> >
> > Is this a bug in rdoc?
>
> No, it's a feature.
>
> Back in the old days, when people typed on typewriters, which didn't
> have an em-dash (what you call a long hyphen) key, two hyphens were
> used to indicate an em-dash. Since the ASCII character set doesn't
> have em-dash, this convention is carried over to rdoc.
>
> Why does this bother you?

Because it's not clearly visible that one must type two dashes there.
The solution would be to not convert special chars in <tt></tt> blocks
(the conversion takes place at
lib\rdoc\markup\simple_markup\to_html.rb:195)