Bitstream Vera does not include U+2010 HYPHEN character

[Andrew Archibald <andrew archibald sympatico ca>]

Hi,

I've just tracked down a rather annoying problem on my Debian system. 
For some reason, when a UTF-8 locale is set, man-db generates both ASCII 
 hyphens and the character U+2010 (I have as yet no idea when or why 
itdoes one rather than the other).  I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold 
in my terminal emulators, and it lacks any glyph for U+2010, so man 
pages appear full of "unknown character" boxes.  The fix is easy: I just 
load the font into fontforge, copy the ASCII hyphen to position U+2010, 
and save the result somewhere fontconfig can find it; the problem goes 
away when I use the new font.

The Unicode hyphen character is supposed to look like the ASCII 
hyphen-or-minus character but disambiguate its meaning.  It should look 
different from the Unicode minus character (mostly in vertical alignment).

The character itself may be easily produced:
$ python -c "print u'\u2010'"
‐

It may not be preserved by the various mailers, and Mozilla Firefox (for 
example) replaces it on the fly with the same character from another font.

I am using Bitstream Vera 1.10.  (Other software versions and so on can 
be found in the Debian bug report, at 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=293850 ).


Thanks,
Andrew