Arch Linux

Ferhiord

Member

From: Moscow, Russia

Registered: 2007-08-14

Posts: 39

"bad" symbols in man pages

How to remove "bad" symbols. I think that it is problem with locale or encoding. Encoding in terminal: UTF-8; Locale: en_US.UTF-8.

Last edited by Ferhiord (2008-02-28 20:04:20)

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Sorry, if my English is not very well.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

Probably this bug.

azleifel

Member

Registered: 2007-10-28

Posts: 486

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

This thread may be helpful too: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=44626

tigrmesh

IRC Op

From: Florida, US

Registered: 2007-12-11

Posts: 794

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

This isn't really an answer to your question, but have you considered getting a colored manpage (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pos … ed_manpage)?  And it _might_ fix your weird characters problem.

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

Waoh, a lot of weird answers here.
The correct one is to unset LESSCHARSET.
And merge /etc/profile.pacnew config file, which now longer sets LESSCHARSET. So on your next login, everything will be fine.

Since this option is called LESSCHARSET, you probably won't have the issue using most. But you can also get colors with less, if you look at the end of the "colored manpage" section on arch wiki.

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

azleifel

Member

Registered: 2007-10-28

Posts: 486

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

Waoh, a lot of weird answers here.
The correct one is to unset LESSCHARSET.
And merge /etc/profile.pacnew config file, which now longer sets LESSCHARSET. So on your next login, everything will be fine.

Since this option is called LESSCHARSET, you probably won't have the issue using most. But you can also get colors with less, if you look at the end of the "colored manpage" section on arch wiki.

I already had the latest /etc/profile, which fixed the odd characters in gnome terminal, but the puzzle for me is that I also needed to add LC_ALL="C" to .bashrc in order to make them go away when I was using a virtual console ($LANG here is en_GB.utf8).  Is there a better - all in one - way?

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

I already had the latest /etc/profile, which fixed the odd characters in gnome terminal, but the puzzle for me is that I also needed to add LC_ALL="C" to .bashrc in order to make them go away when I was using a virtual console ($LANG here is en_GB.utf8).  Is there a better - all in one - way?

You don't need to do that. Check that LESSCHARSET is no longer set.
And also check /etc/man.conf(.pacnew), and make sure there are no mention of -Tlatin1 anywhere (normally in groff arguments).

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

azleifel

Member

Registered: 2007-10-28

Posts: 486

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

You don't need to do that. Check that LESSCHARSET is no longer set.
And also check /etc/man.conf(.pacnew), and make sure there are no mention of -Tlatin1 anywhere (normally in groff arguments).

I checked and LESSCHARSET is definitely not set and there is no mention of -Tlatin1 anywhere in /etc/man.conf (and I'm up to date with merging .pacnew files).  The virtual console problem is perfectly reproducible: If I have "export LC_ALL="C"" in ~/.bashrc when I ctrl-alt-Fn to a virtual console then everything is fine; comment it out and the question marks will reappear and not just where there are back quotes.

There's something deeper to this that is beyond my ken.  For example, (with LC_ALL="C" set) in gnome terminal the brasero man page will have a backquote in the first line of the OPTIONS section:

This program follows the usual  GNU  command  line  syntax,  with  long options  starting  with  two  dashes  (`-').

but when I view the same page in a virtual console the dash is surrounded by proper single quotes.

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

You don't need to do that. Check that LESSCHARSET is no longer set.
And also check /etc/man.conf(.pacnew), and make sure there are no mention of -Tlatin1 anywhere (normally in groff arguments).

I checked and LESSCHARSET is definitely not set and there is no mention of -Tlatin1 anywhere in /etc/man.conf (and I'm up to date with merging .pacnew files).  The virtual console problem is perfectly reproducible: If I have "export LC_ALL="C"" in ~/.bashrc when I ctrl-alt-Fn to a virtual console then everything is fine; comment it out and the question marks will reappear and not just where there are back quotes.

There's something deeper to this that is beyond my ken.  For example, (with LC_ALL="C" set) in gnome terminal the brasero man page will have a backquote in the first line of the OPTIONS section:

This program follows the usual  GNU  command  line  syntax,  with  long options  starting  with  two  dashes  (`-').

but when I view the same page in a virtual console the dash is surrounded by proper single quotes.

You can add my last comment to the list of weird answers. Sorry it was a bit late, and I read half your question
I never use virtual consoles (only for starting / switching wm).

Edit : Ok, I knew the main difference between both was probably the font used. But it's weird, many fonts in kbd are supposed to be compatible with unicode.
Yet, I didn't see the dash with many of them, but two question marks like you...
Well, I finally found a set of font in kbd package that worked :
setfont LatArCyrHeb-14
Or if you have terminus fonts installed, these worked too :
setfont ter-v14n

You can see the list of fonts in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/
And you can specify them in rc.conf (rc.sysinit will run setfont itself) :
CONSOLEFONT=LatArCyrHeb-14

Last edited by shining (2008-02-29 20:15:11)

---

pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

azleifel

Member

Registered: 2007-10-28

Posts: 486

Re: "bad" symbols in man pages

You can add my last comment to the list of weird answers. Sorry it was a bit late, and I read half your question
I never use virtual consoles (only for starting / switching wm).

Edit : Ok, I knew the main difference between both was probably the font used. But it's weird, many fonts in kbd are supposed to be compatible with unicode.
Yet, I didn't see the dash with many of them, but two question marks like you...
Well, I finally found a set of font in kbd package that worked :
setfont LatArCyrHeb-14
Or if you have terminus fonts installed, these worked too :
setfont ter-v14n

You can see the list of fonts in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/
And you can specify them in rc.conf (rc.sysinit will run setfont itself) :
CONSOLEFONT=LatArCyrHeb-14

Many thanks for spending time on this shining.  I prefer the LatArCyrHeb font and am going to go with that one .