[texhax] Questions about Bibtex page range setting

[Barbara Beeton]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2012, Thomas Schneider wrote:

    Ruan:

    > Well, I do not just want to keep it in the database. I am seeking
    > for a method to generate a single dash in my final output, since
    > latex will always put two dashes in the pdf file. Do you have any
    > suggestions?

    Not being an expert on these things, I created a PDF with an entry
    from a double dash in the bib database.  This comes out as a single
    dash when cutting and pasting.  It's a unicode double byte character. 
    It does NOT look like two dashes in Skim on Mac OS X.  I get 3 unicode
    bytes cutting from an Acrobat display.  In acrobat it looks and
    handles like one character.

the question isn't how to get an en-dash.
(en-dashes are used to indicate spans, for
example of pages, 23--25, or years, 1954--63.)
ruan wants a simple hyphen, which might be
used to indicate a page within a part, A-23,
instead of a span.  (i'm using a letter here
to make the distinction more obvious.)

bibtex apparently doesn't want to allow this.
there must be a way, using braces, perhaps
  pages = {7{-}23},
if not, then defining a command such as
  \def\nbhyph{-\nobreak}
and having this resolved at the latex level
rather than by bibtex, is probably the best
that can be suggested.
						-- bb