man -t ls converts - to . Is there a way I can tell man -t to not do that? I prefer having -, as the - is often part of examples where  would be wrong (e.g. options).
man -t converts - to 
man;groff
In the original file, the minus '-' symbols really are backslashified to '\-' which would then be interpreted in the way you do not like.A solution is to filter the file before feeding it to man for formatting:zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | man -tl - > ls-normal.pszcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | sed 's/\\-/-/g' | man -tl - > ls-minus.psThe second form replaces the ''s with '-'s on my system.PS: My previous answer was wrong - apologies!