RE: man pages with weird characters

[Barry Buchbinder <BBUCHBINDER at niaid dot nih dot gov>]

I had the same problem (on Win98).  I found one old mailing list post
<http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/cygwin/1998-11/msg00686.html> recommending
exporting the following variables.

export LESSCHARDEF=8bcccbcc18b95.33b33b.
export LESSBINFMT='*n-'

It worked for me.  Does anyone have a feel for which is a better solution?

- Barry Buchbinder
bb158u@nih.gov

============================================

To: cygwin at sourceware dot cygnus dot com 
     Subject: man pages with weird characters 
     From: "David O'Shea" <david at ems dot uq dot edu dot au> 
     Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 12:04:54 +1000 (EST) 

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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