Extraneous characters in mutt text manual?

[Mark S. Reglewski]

Eric Blake wrote:
>> According to Mark S. Reglewski on 3/23/2007 3:20 AM:
>> less /usr/share/doc/mutt-1.4.2.2/manual.txt
>>
>> I get a display like this:
>>   <B7>  ESC[1mset-flag ESC[22m(default: w)
>> 
>> Does anyone else observe this, or is this a me-only problem?
> 
> I'm guessing that you also upgraded man.  There is a known bad interaction
> between the current default man settings and the PAGER environment
> variable.  A quick search of the list shows this:
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-03/msg00086.html
> 
Thanks Eric for the quick response. I checked the reference you cited, 
which is a discussion of bollixed man page display. It's a related 
problem, but not quite the same as this situation. If I invoke...

man any_man_page

...display of the man pages is fine. The suggested fix for the chap 
whose man page display was hosed -- invoking "less -isrR" -- does clean 
up the display of the mutt manual.txt file considerably: the numerous 
escape code sequences disappear, leaving only a few formatting codes in 
the form <letter digit>. The document becomes humanly readable with the 
workaround.

Forgive a naive question from a naive user: should there be any 
formatting codes/escape sequences at all to work around in what's 
supposed to be a plaintext file? /usr/share/doc/mutt-1.4.2.2/manual.txt 
gives this as it's last line: "This document was written in SGML, and 
then rendered using the sgml-tools package." Haven't the utilities used 
to render the plaintext file from its SGML source left unwanted gunk in 
this instance?

Cordially,
Mark

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