Suggestion regarding the documentation

Hours to decipher my hints? I described the issue right in the first post - dashes and single quotes.
Also that's quite a way of quoting out of context - I didn't say that the issue was significant to _me_ personally. And I also didn't complain or demand to get a fix - it's right in the thread title - a suggestion.

I guess you are 'reading' a tone that isn't there. I'm sorry if you feel bothered by my choice of words or me pointing out an issue without the inclination to gather the required knowledge to fix it myself.

Regarding specific locations, here some examples quickly scrolling through the pdfs:
Every pin name in LinuxCNC_Manual.pdf that contains a dash seems to use the 'wrong' character for the dash (U+2212). This one keeps getting me and others. There's even a tutorial on youtube on linucnc that points out the issue with the wrong chars.
Example from LinuxCNC_Documentation.pdf: py code on page 401 contains the wrong single quotes (U+2019). Another example is on page 450.

I would guess it's a matter of changing some params in the pdf production. No idea.

Anyway - I'm not going to post anything else in this thread. I really don't want to argue or defend myself.

As another user, Thank you. I do appreciate you taking the time to highlight the issue. The last, very specific post you made on the unicode specifics and where you found the exact problem are exactly the sort of troubleshooting help that are needed. I love that LinuxCNC is so good and getting better all the time.

Nebur,

Your last post was very much more useful than your first post as it clearly lists the problem.

It was not apparent that your problem was with the PDF documentation, and it was not clear that the problem was with whatever creates the PDF documentation that it was using the wrong character codes.

I personally have never used the PDF's and just use the online HTML documentation and I don't believe I've had an issue with copy and pasting code into the terminal or into scripts.

Much more useful to understand the problem specifically. I can't be of help in sorting it, but I'm sure its probably more helpful than the first to someone who understands the workings of the PDF'ing tool that linuxcnc uses when it compiles its debs / online docs.

RGH wrote:

Regarding specific locations, here some examples quickly scrolling through the pdfs:
Every pin name in LinuxCNC_Manual.pdf that contains a dash seems to use the 'wrong' character for the dash (U+2212). This one keeps getting me and others. There's even a tutorial on youtube on linucnc that points out the issue with the wrong chars.
Example from LinuxCNC_Documentation.pdf: py code on page 401 contains the wrong single quotes (U+2019). Another example is on page 450.

Ah, the PDF docs. I do see what you are talking about, but when I check the source that the pdfs are made from, the issue does not exist. I think there are few people on this project who truly understand how the pdfs are generated, and the bad characters are getting added at that point. I am not familiar with that process at all, so it's no easy fix (for me).

Honestly I gave up on the pdf versions a long time ago. The formatting is a bit clunky. Most of the main docs are written in asciidoc, and as such are best viewed in html (which is also local to your PC if you choose to install the docs). The man pages show up correctly in html as well. Alternatively, you could view them at the source, on github. Probably not what you want to hear, but that's the best I can do for now.

For what it's worth, I did spend a bit of time combing through the English docs source and replacing all of the bad unicode characters I could find. I will be pushing that commit at some point here in the next day or so.

I said I wouldn't post here anymore but here I am again.
Sorry if the initial post wasn't specific enough. The initial echo wasn't asking for details so I assumed the it was clear what I was referring to.
I also didn't check if the html docs also used those funny characters or if it was only the pdfs, so I assumed they did.

The pdf's have some advantages: Full text search maybe is arguably the most important one, e.g. when researching a topic. The ability to add own notes on text passages and highlighting stuff right in the document is nice to have too.
Also it's what's right there on the real machine in the shop that might not be connected to the internet.

Thanks for the suggestions regarding using the html docs/source/github, but I'm really not looking for help for me personally.
It was just an idea for a seemingly simple improvement...

Thanks for looking into it anyway!

RGH wrote:

Hours to decipher my hints? I described the issue right in the first post - dashes and single quotes.

Actually, I am forced to admit that you are right on the dashes. It's a complete pain but it's often the web browsers that do it. They publish a minus in the source as an en-dash on the page. 

We have tried to fix it, but the fixes seem to make it worse. 
github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/commit/4a89...8e98ea56a7417c9c88ad