# Typesetting long options in rdoc

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/typesetting-long-options-in-rdoc/72122>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 14, 2006, 3:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/typesetting-long-options-in-rdoc/72122 "2006-10-14T15:26:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![wybodekker](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/f05b48/32.png) [@wybodekker](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wybodekker)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2006, 3:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/typesetting-long-options-in-rdoc/72122/1 "2006-10-14T15:26:22Z")

</div>

I don’t succeed in nicely typesetting long options in itemized lists in  
rdoc.  
The RDOC documentation ([RDoc Documentation](http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/doc/)) tells me this  
example:

=begin rdoc

–output _name [, name]_::  
specify the name of one or more output files. If multiple  
files are present, the first is used as the index.

–quiet::: do not output the names, sizes, byte counts,  
index areas, or bit ratios of units as  
they are processed.

=end

But the result (see [http://www.servalys.nl/doc/](http://www.servalys.nl/doc/) ) is that the – are  
seen as a single long hyphen (actually —), while I want to see a  
hyphen, a little white space and then another hyphen.

When I insert a space between the to hyphens, the result is two very  
narrow hyphens with excessive whitespace in between.

Is there a better way to do this?