man pages with weird characters

["David O'Shea" <david at ems dot uq dot edu dot au>]

Hi all,
	Yesterday I got really sick of the fact that I get weird
characters in my man pages (as described under BUGS in the page man(1)),
so I decided to look into it.  The suggested solution of setting
LESSCHARSET to "latin1" didn't work, it just replaced the reverse-video
"<AD>" with an upside-down question mark.

	I can't really explain it all, but the console font is not latin1
like most of the other fonts under windows.  If you go into Character Map
and look up character 0xAD in, say, Arial, it's a dash as you would expect
(that's why man is trying to put it at the end of the line in the middle
of broken words).  For fonts like Terminal, etc., that are used for the
console, that character is an upside-down question mark, which you'll see
if you try setting LESSCHARSET to "latin1".

	The solution I found was to edit /lib/man.conf and change the
lines:

NROFF		/usr/bin/groff -Tlatin1 -mandoc
NEQN		/usr/bin/eqn -Tlatin1

to:

NROFF		/usr/bin/groff -Tascii -mandoc
NEQN		/usr/bin/eqn -Tascii

	This stops grotty from trying to use a special dash character
(0xAD); it will just use a standard ASCII minus sign as found on your
keyboard.

	This fixed the problem for me at least - I don't know if others
experience this problem (maybe they do and can just ignore it!), but
hopefully someone else will find this useful.  If this is standard
behaviour on all Windows boxes, maybe cygwin could come like this by
default?

Regards,
David


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