Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
Actually, looking closer, the information seems to be lost entirely.
Asciidoc renders this to <literal> in the XML, but docbook seems to
throw it away when converting to a manpage. In theory it's possible to
apply our own xsl style to turn this into something else, and I think
that is a better solution than just trying to fix this one spot.
When I check the asciidoc output for manpages (which I rarely do), I often
render it to Postscript to see the typesetting. I guess not many people
consider manpages are for printing anymore but are solely for monospaced
terminal consumption these days.