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finferflu

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From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

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[SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Hi,
I remember I had read a similar thread, but I can't find it anymore.
My problem is that man pages show strange characters and it's quite difficult to read at times. Here is an example:

The traditional protocol for writing to someone is that the string <80><98>-o', either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means that it's the other person's turn to talk.   The  string
       <80><98>oo' means that the person believes the conversation to be over.

How do I fix this?

Thanks.

Last edited by finferflu (2008-02-27 17:53:23)

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dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Putting this in ~/.bashrc should fix it:

export LC_ALL=C

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finferflu

Forum Fellow

From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

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Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Ah thanks a lot, it's fixed now

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Cilyan

Member

From: Toulouse (FR)

Registered: 2006-08-27

Posts: 97

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Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Hello

Here is a post on that problem if you can read french : http://forums.archlinuxfr.org/viewtopic.php?id=1084

The members suggested to replace

export LESSCHARSET="utf8"

by

export LESSCHARSET="UTF-8"

in /etc/profile.

One suggest to replace the line inside /etc/man.conf (from the gentoo wiki fr)

NROFF           iconv -f utf8 -t iso8859-1 | /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -c -mandoc

I must admit that it doesn't work for me neither, and the above does not solve the problem. The file I tested is UTF-8 encoded and the LESSCHARSET defined to use UTF-8 gives badly accentuated characters (But at least printable characters). I think you will have to tweak a little these lines, but it's a start.

Note that these lines suit (or don't suit) french man pages, but you may have to change the given charsets (especially latin1).

Hope it will help you search

Cilyan

Edit: Ah, time to write the answer, the problem is solved !
Edit2: The tip given by dyscoria does not work for me.

Last edited by Cilyan (2008-02-27 18:01:57)

finferflu

Forum Fellow

From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

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Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Cilyan, thanks a lot for your effort anyway

I have actually modified the entry that dyscoria suggested me, just adding double quotes, but I didn't try with no quotes:

export LC_ALL="C"

Does it work for you with the double quotes?

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lman

Member

From: CZ

Registered: 2007-12-18

Posts: 255

Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Hi,

I replaced less with most to be used with man. It solved it for me

dolby

Member

From: 1992

Registered: 2006-08-08

Posts: 1,581

Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

as far as most: http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/5 … pages.html

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peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

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Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

This was reported as a bug, but Phrakture said:

unset LESSCHARSET

It worked for me.

finferflu

Forum Fellow

From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Putting this in ~/.bashrc should fix it:

export LC_ALL=C

Thanks, that worked great for my Ubuntu 7.10

Be aware that if you use non-English characters they will appear as question marks in the terminal. At least that's what happened to me. All I did was replacing less with most as pager and browser to read the man pages. Now I got nice colourised man pages

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Youdaman

Member

From: Sydney, Australia

Registered: 2006-01-14

Posts: 41

Re: [SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

I had the same trouble with the weird characters showing up, and depending what I'd try to resolve it, I'd either get the angle-brackets with numbers effect, or the question marks in diamonds -- in the end the solution was to remove my man.conf and reinstall man (and I think I also made sure my /etc/profile was the latest, i.e. replaced it with the /etc/profile.pacnew I had, although not sure if that's related)... anyhow, doing a fresh install and using default settings seems to have fixed it, so I guess it's been fixed in the various packages involved... if in doubt, remove (copy somewhere safe) old configs and reinstall stuff