Arch Linux

carlocci

Member

From: Padova - Italy

Registered: 2008-02-12

Posts: 368

man and unicode

Hello, I'm having 2 problems with man.

The first one has been bugging me from the start:

carlocci /usr/share/man/man8  $  man foo
Non c' una voce per foo

it should report "Non c'è una voce per foo". I have this problem both in vc and in konsole.

I use ter-v16n in vc
If I set CONSOLEMAP blank, it displays the rectangle as it does in konsole
If I set CONSOLEMAP="8859_to_uni", it displays the negative question mark

Also I noticed that

carlocci /usr/share/man/man8  $  LC_ALL="C" man foo
Non c' una voce per foo

which turns other programs to English, but not man.
Which environment variable does man base its language on?

The second problem might be a bug which can be seen in the dhcpcd man-page:
it looks like the first dash of every parameter is a unicode character (or I believe it is because it is displayed only if your virtual console is unicode).
It even screws up the man page saw in kosole since the "unicode dash" is longer and eats some of the space of the next character (I will post a pic if you can't reproduce this, it looks like a japanese hyphen).
I don't really know why man has such a problem displaying strange characters.

sirocco

Member

Registered: 2008-03-10

Posts: 149

Re: man and unicode

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43689
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 44#p332844
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=44817

carlocci

Member

From: Padova - Italy

Registered: 2008-02-12

Posts: 368

Re: man and unicode

hello, thank you for your reply!
Maybe my post wasn't clear enough: I don't have any missing man page.
My problem is with the missing character "è" in the error message of man for non existing man pages like foo or iohqoiwehohwqeoqhw.

I think I will file a bug for the dhcpcd man page, but I wanted to be sure I didn't screw up with my local settings first.

carlocci

Member

From: Padova - Italy

Registered: 2008-02-12

Posts: 368

Re: man and unicode

hello I noticed another problem with man:
if I search for a partial word like /lor , then man highlights one letter more in bold words:
for example a /lor search highlights the letters olor in the --color parameter in the ls man page.
Normal text (ie non bold) is highlighted correctly

Last edited by carlocci (2008-03-29 19:56:57)

peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

Website

Re: man and unicode

I don't know how to help you, but this might clarify things a bit: man uses a pager to display the man pages; the default pager is "less". If the pager has problems rendering the text, you need to fix the pager, not man.

Unless man is outputting bad text... but it works fine here.

Last edited by peets (2008-03-29 21:19:55)

carlocci

Member

From: Padova - Italy

Registered: 2008-02-12

Posts: 368

Re: man and unicode

my first problem is a bug in man:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7477

Unless man is outputting bad text... but it works fine here.

Probably the dhcpcd man page is bad formatted, do you display it right?
Does your search highlighting work fine?

I know man uses different programs for paging, formatting and so on: the last error I noticed was a groff misconfiguration which didn't remap \' to ' making man pages to have slanted quotes instead of single quotes.

I use less as pager, maybe I should try to use most in order to see if less is the one giving problems.

Thank you for your reply